


Home Is Where You Live Inside of Me

by More_night



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, Big Season One Feels Party, Case Fic, Christmas, Gen, I Thought About It and I Removed the Fluff Tag, M/M, Moving to Slash, Post-Episode: s01e09 Trou Normand, Pre-Slash, Proto-Murder Family, Then Alternate Universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2016-01-11
Packaged: 2018-05-08 21:04:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 46,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5513276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/More_night/pseuds/More_night
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“How is Abigail?” Alana asked.</p><p>“She’s shaken. I would think it better to let her stay out of Port Haven,” Hannibal said. “For the time being.”</p><p>“Will?”</p><p>“She said she liked it here,” Will said, eyes on Hannibal. “She talked about home a lot.” All Will could think about <em>were Abigail’s hands cutting the prone man’s abdominal cavity open from the side. A dark liquid soaked in her jeans while she knelt there, focused, waiting for Nicholas Boyle’s body to empty at her feet. She lifted her eyes to Will's. “I wish you would forget that,” she said quietly, her mouth starting to twist into a shy smile.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1.

**Author's Note:**

> I started this, and it grew, and grew, and grew. AND GREW.
> 
> Takes place after Trou Normand (1x09) and refers to the events taking place in this episode, then diverges.

 

December 17

 

On the ground, the maggot twisted as it strived forward. It was trying to reach the spill of oily fluid leaking from the nearest of the three bins. There was nothing outstanding in this larva, yet Will Graham saw an image of himself, as in all things, because they all were only shimmering reflections, broken and sparkling. He too felt exposed, crawling toward a remnant of death, to feed, to drink, to dream from it.

“Will,” Beverly Katz said. “How do you feel about Jell-O shots?”

Shapes and objects suddenly regained a presence of their own around him. The alley, the cold black asphalt, the groups of officers, the coroner staff waiting by their van, the carefully wrapped body, the spicy smell of garbage needling his nose. Taking his glasses off, Will exhaled. His attention left the maggot and returned to the body, lying on the cold ground, still partially covered in the sheets it had been wrapped in. Bed sheets dotted with small blue daisies and their tiny green stems and leaves. The wrapping was tight and precise, no rope involved, just a clean fold, they were not torn, but neatly cut. At first sight, it seemed like mummification, but it had a kind of specific oddness. The layers of sheets were so numerous that the blood had barely seeped through.

There was no wound except for the large stitched area on the abdomen and the long incision it covered, on the side. From where he stood, it was unclear how deep the torso itself had also been cut: the arms had been bound to the skin of the chest, but the threads going through the fingers were not strong enough, they could not maintain one of the two limbs attached, it had snapped. Will’s fingers went to his forehead. “Right now?”

Beverly grinned at him from where she was crouching in the snow. “So you vote for straight tequila?” She leaned back to photograph the corpse’s hand.

Price was feeling for the feet of the body where they were bundled in the sheets. “Are you sure about doing this in the morgue?” he said.

“Why not? They don’t care,” Zeller replied.

“We do. The living should minimally respect the dead,” Price said.

“Before or after sawing their torsos open to cut pieces of their organs and stick them under microscopes?”

“Knowledge isn’t disrespect,” Will said. “Could anyone fill me in on the subject of conversation?”

Beverly rubbed the snow off her gloves. “Christmas party. Booze. Morgue.” Her face wore a smile and a frown at the same time. “You don’t look like you do that a lot.”

Will smiled, but it came out a bit sad and nervous. “Does it show?”

“You could bring your eminent festive spirit,” she said.

And Will smiled a bit more. “That’s me. The life of the party.”

“I guess they’re too much? Parties?”

Will’s smile was gone and his mind was back to the crime scene. “Everything’s too much right now.” Falling from the white December skies, a few drops of ice-cold water touched his forehead, and his headache felt duller and farther for a moment.

Beverly held his gaze for a while, but there was nothing else to say. Her face showed warmth and Will knew he could trust her, and at the same time knew he could not, not entirely, because he felt his insides stirring with something that he would not show anyone, in fear that it might devour him or them.

Price sighed. “What’s that?” He was pointing at the corpse’s chest. Beneath the stitches, tiny branches seemed to stick out.

“He might have been carried here, and these got stuck into the…” Zeller said. But Beverly lifted the stitched arm as much as the thread allowed and exposed the wound. Through the stitches, wood shavings were visible, straining against the ragged, pink edges. Now that they could look, the abdomen was swollen. A burst of perfume hit them, and for a moment, the odors of garbage and winter twirled in the air around another, much stronger one.

“Camphorwood,” Will said.

He crouched by the body and it materialized around  _him just as colors would in the spring, blooming flowers, and a flow of such purity and grace. The body was prone on the ground, it was morning in a green, lively pasture, and the sun was high, and everyone was ready for their new life to begin._

_Will took the knife out of the abdomen and pushed the body on its side. Now he just had to wait until the contents flowed out, the bowels went first, hesitant at first, and then they tumbled together, they took a lot of the digestive organs with them, stomach, liver, spleen. He had to reach inside to yank the kidneys from their arteries. Normally, he thought, all of this would have to be… liquified, so that it would disappear entirely. It would be cleaner, purer._

_Blood and viscera at his feet. Then the camphorwood went in, and the shining rocks of myrrh. The body needed to be protected, but not hidden. It was not a secret, it was a…_

Blinking, he came to his senses on his heels in the snow, breathing sharp, Price, Zeller and Katz standing back.

He stumbled to his feet and went to sit on the hood of a police car. Beverly came closer, watched him take aspirin.

“Did I touch it?” he said.

“No. But you didn’t even wait for us to leave. One moment you were there, and then the next not.” She put her hands in the tiny pockets of her leather jacket and inwardly he thanked her for not reaching out. He would have burst from it. “Are you losing your footing with this?”

“Not just literally.”

“I suppose you don’t really know what you’re doing, when you do what you do. But I don’t remember it being so…” She searched for a word.

“I know,” he said. “I used to feel myself go, I could keep track of where I was going. It felt controllable.” The sky was turning to grey with the coming sunset. It was not even four o’clock. “Now, I just see myself, walking off.”

Jack Crawford had watched from a distance. He walked closer, but all Will could think about _were Abigail’s hands cutting the prone man’s abdominal cavity open from the side. A dark liquid soaked in her jeans while she knelt there, focused, waiting for Nicholas Boyle’s body to empty at her feet. She lifted her eyes to Will's. “I wish you would forget that,” she said quietly, her mouth starting to twist into a shy smile._

“With this amount of ritualization, there’ll be more,” Jack stated. Will tensed.

“I don’t know, Jack. Maybe.”

For a moment, Jack’s face showed concern, but it went through Will, as if it was not entirely directed at him. Around them, the alley had emptied. Price and Zeller took more pictures as forensics personnel slipped the body in a bag for transport. “Is there anything you can tell me?”

“It’s…” Will tried to breathe in to freshen his thinking. “It’s not desecration. It’s made to have all the appearances of desecration, but it’s not. There’s some dimension of the deepest, strongest will to preserve and purify into this.”

“This man was buried in a garbage bin and it’s not desecration,” Jack repeated dubiously.

“I need more stuff. I’ll tell you more with the autopsy report,” Will said. Jack nodded, eyes on the body. “Can Bella travel for the holidays?” Will asked, quietly, after a moment.

Jack nodded slowly, a smile both fond and resigned slowly forming. “Yes. We’ll…” He stopped and shifted. “We’ll go and visit her parents in Wisconsin. She insisted she wanted them to have good memories too.”

Will smiled too, but Jack lifted his head and observed the darkening buildings around them.

 

* * *

 

Looking up from the volume he had pulled out of Hannibal Lecter’s bookshelf, Will let his gaze go about in the faint glow of the streetlamps, visible outside, through the translucent blinds, the homely yellow of winter like  _the yellow markings where the wound’s edge had been soaked in myrrh extract_. “There was an abdominal incision. The chest was filled with-…”

“Camphorwood, myrrh and lavender,” Hannibal supplied, from where he sat at his desk, transcribing notes from a brown notebook into a black one. “Embalming?”

Will frowned, put the  _Companion to Forensic Anthropology_  back in its place on the shelf and got up. “Maybe. But amateurish. More like stuffing.”

The psychiatrist adjusted the left cuff of his shirt. “Just in time for the holidays,” he said, glancing up to see the other man climb down the ladder.

Will stood facing the window and Hannibal could not see his expression. “I can’t get a clear view of this one. It’s like I’m looking through twists of vines or an intricate nest of branches and torns.”

Else than the camphorwood and incense, whose blunt perfume clung to Will’s clothes, Hannibal smelled mud resulting from the mix of dust and snow, the lingering, heavy tone of garbage, and, far underneath, the working cogs of the fever. “You told Jack the autopsy report would focus your attention,” he said, steady, reassuring. “Do you still not believe that?”

“I hope so.” Will gathered his coat and took his bag, his body angled toward the door. “Do you have appointments over the holidays?”

Hannibal brushed a scrape of paper from the black notebook’s open page. “A few are currently scheduled, yes. I can accomodate you, if needed.”

“If we find another body like this one, I’ll drop you a line. I’m sure you have a lot on your plate,” the younger man said. He walked closer, his steps bringing him to circle the chaise, keeping something between them at all times.

“What makes you say that?”

“You socialize. Holidays are an occasion for that.”

“There are a few events I plan to attend. I will host a dinner party on New Year’s Eve.” Hannibal paused, placed his fountain pen down. “To which I’d love to have the pleasure of your company.”

Will’s uneasy smile was a barrier in itself. “No, thank you.” He slipped his coat on, tilted his head to stretch the muscles of his neck. “You don’t have to keep inviting me.”

“I consider it a reminder of the existence of our friendship,” he replied. Will was waiting for something, but it was unclear what exactly. Hannibal decided to press on and rose from his seat. “Did you keep your gift? For Abigail?”

“No,” Will said. “It made me feel improper. I returned it.”

“Improper for what? Feeling affection?”

Extending a hand, Will’s face twisted around a humorless smile. “Affection that I’m in no place to give,” he corrected. “Especially now.” Hannibal could not tell whether Abigail seemed repulsive to Will because of her crime, or if Will’s own affection for her was simply tarnished.

Images of  _Abigail’s bloodied hands, clinging to Nicholas Boyle’s clothing, her mouth gasping for air, and then her face stilling into the cold, calm acceptance of death, and the river of pride_  rushed in Hannibal’s mind. He buttoned his jacket, walked closer. “I wanted to invite her here, for Christmas,” he started. “But Alana told me she would be spending time with relatives. A great aunt’s stepdaughter, I think. On the maternal side.”

Exhaling tersely, Will nodded, keeping his mind from Abigail’s father, from his knife, from the cabin in the forest, from the soft imprints of darkness. “At least she’s out of Port Haven. Holidays are hard enough on their own, they can’t be better in a psychiatric institution,” Will said.

“They were hard on you?”

The other man’s brow tightened somewhat, but he did not openly deflect. “My father would go out. Didn’t really come back for a few days. I’d go out too. It was strange, to walk the deserted streets, with the houses lit and filled and golden,” he explained, faraway.

“You were already used to solitude.”

“Not used to it as much as preferring it to company. I felt trapped, like I floated. But I knew it was better. I looked at the people inside the houses and they seemed protected, safe, living their looping lives to no end,” Will went on, before he shut his eyes, pulling out of the memory itself, or of its telling. “What are you doing on Christmas? Lithuanians are Catholics, right?”

Hannibal approved with a small smile. “I was baptized as such at birth, but I’m not inclined to religious displays, at least not in the collective sense.”

“You just stay on your own?”

“One’s interior world can be densely populated, with both objects and persons.”

“You sound in control,” Will said.

“I like to believe I am.” 

Will stood before the door, eyes to the ground first, then going to the windows on his right. He fidgeted with the sling of his bag and sighed. “For the past few days, I’ve been trying to avoid a certain train of thought. And now my mind won’t let it go.” Hannibal cocked his head, opening his palms at his side, mute. “So I’m going to ask you a question,” Will said. “And I want you to answer me.”

“I don’t believe I’ve ever left your questions unanswered, Will.”

Exhaling, Will asked, “Which one of you carried Nicholas Boyle’s body? Whose idea was it?”

They held each other’s gaze for a time. “I did. And it was a common idea, that came in a moment of stress and alarm,” Hannibal said. “Abigail was panicked and I made the only suggestion that seemed rational at the moment.”

“At the moment.”

Touching a knuckle to the edge of the powder-blue seat against the wall, Hannibal looked away. “I was relieved when Nicholas Boyle’s body was discovered. And more so when I told you of my involvment.”

Will scoffed and shook his head. “You wouldn’t have told me on your own.”

“Why would I have told you, Will? To burden you further and make me feel better?” Hannibal moved closer, looking in equal parts composed, concerned and offended. The darkness in the office seemed thicker, as if the walls leaned over them to touch above their heads. Will felt the death around him mix with care, and all of it climbed onto him until he suffocated. He shut his eyes and breathed out. Hannibal went on. “You want Abigail pure, away from death and exempt of obscurity. She’s not, Will. Neither am I. Neither are you. Your love for her won’t change that, nor will it be changed by that.”

 

* * *

 

In the corner stood a small, artificial Christmas tree. The branches were a dark green, from far they looked black, they were heavy, they seemed too big for the trunk and too sparse. A tiny light cord had been hung, along with bright red ornaments.

As soon as the sun set, one of the nurses from downstairs came to turn the light cord on, and Abigail was content to sit on the couch beside the tree and read. The warm white the tiny lights gave was barely enough for her to see the words on the page of her book. But she would stare at them anyway to avoid the _constant, glaring and loving look of her father, from where he would stand at the other end of the room, or where he would sit in the pale blue chair, near the table_. Sometimes, she would let her gaze drift through the pine needles, going deep in the forest of mingled dark and light, searching for his face there too.

Abigail sat down at the table while Freddie Lounds set her purse down, slipped off her terracotta faux fur short coat and fetched a notebook and a pen from her bag. “Where are you going?” she asked, continuing the conversation they had started in the stairs coming down from her room.

“Is where I’m going in the book?” Abigail said. She had meant for her voice to be quiet. Instead, she had sounded stubborn and taut. She kept twitching her fingers together.

“Not if you don’t want it,” Lounds corrected, gently. She extended a hand over the table, as if to reach for her, but she stopped midway and smiled warmly.

Trying to remember Aunt Missie's complete name, Abigail looked up and forward. “I’m… going to stay with my mother’s family for a few days.”

Lounds’ smile widened. Abigail felt the kindness of it, not all of it fake. She wondered how phony it was inside. “That sounds great.”

Abigail briefly let her lips twist upward as well, until she felt like Lounds’ mirror, then she turned away and let it go. “I haven’t seen these people in ages. I don’t know if they remember me.” She closed her eyes. “I mean, I don’t know if they remembered me before they saw me on TV about my dad.”

Crossing her hands, lacing her fingers, control and beauty and strenght, Lounds pondered how much she could keep of the real Abigail Hobbs, or how much she actually saw. “It’s good that you meet with normal people once in a while,” she said. “Get out of this whole morbid setting. In and out of hospitals. Patients and doctors.”

“I see Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter too. And you.”

“Dr. Lecter is a psychiatrist. And Will Graham should be a patient.”

She stiffened, licked her bottom lip. Her scarf felt tight on the wound on her neck. “They’re fine. I like Dr. Bloom too.”

Lounds closed her notebook, her pen holding the page, and she sat back. “While I can’t pretend to know what you’ve been through, I think it’s important you see how real people react to your story. To you. How they behave. You’ll have to get back in the real world eventually.”

It was windy outside. The brown leaves on the ground seemed damp and heavy, but the walls around Abigail did not feel much more hospitable for that. “I’m getting there. Aren’t you real?” she said, furrowing her brow.

There was a change in Freddie Lounds' smile. She seemed to apologize. “Well, I’m used to death.”

“It’s okay to be used to death.”

“No, it’s not,” Lounds insisted. “You should be allowed to get away from all this, instead of hanging around people who bring you back into it. Will Graham killed your father. Hannibal Lecter was there with him.”

Abigail turned away from Lounds  _and she felt hands on her neck, those of her father holding her upright, those of Will Graham trying to hold the blood back, and those of Hannibal Lecter grasping the wound shut. She gasped and gasped and gasped. And all three of them looked down at her and said,_ “ _You’re with us into this, Abigail.”_ She took a deep breath. Freddie Lounds watched her, worried that there might be too much frailty underneath for anything else than raw feelings to come out once she would press a little harder down. Eventually, Abigail said, “You’re going to be the one writing, right? I tell you the story, and you write it.”

The notebook was opened again, a flash of white from the blank page. The space where truth would be written down, the newborn shape of Abigail’s pure self. “In as compelling a fashion as possible,” Freddie approved.

Abigail wondered where to start. _When her father had first taken her hunting. When she had understood what he did, the first time, but it was hard to tell, she had not believed it at all, and then all of a sudden it was happening and she was doing it. When she had had her throat cut. When she had woken up in the hospital. The smell of rotten leaves, the voice of his father in the kitchen, standing before the sink, asking her, “At that cabin, is she going to be alone?”. When the breakfast was ready and she was hungry, and her mother ran and Abigail did not understand why at first, she was confused, and then she saw it in the way her father moved, the glistening knife, and her mother scrambling on the floor. And the bed sheets in the hospital, never warm enough, never heavy enough._  “It’s not really compelling to me,” she whispered.

Freddie Lounds noted a word Abigail could not read. Then she tilted her head up. “I know you don’t want to be my friend. It’s fine. I want to help you in a way that doesn’t require us to be friendly, Abigail. But you’ll have to tell me how you felt about things. Can you do that?”

“Yeah.”

“So. Your mother’s family?”

 

* * *

 

 _The heart monitor beeped steadily when Will came to his senses. He moved his head forward, only to feel the strain it pulled in his back and neck. Brighter than the rest was the pain from the bruise on his right shoulder, from where he had knocked the Hobbs’ door down. Blinking, he found Hannibal Lecter's fingers, not on his arm, but on the armrest of the visitors’ chair._ “ _Do you plan to stay all night?_ _”_ _the other man asked him._

 _Will hesitated for a split second._ “ _Yes,_ _”_ _he said._ “ _What time is it?_ _”_

 _Dr Lecter stood tall beside Will’s chair, his eyes shifted from him to Abigail._ “ _A little after midnight._ _”_

“ _Do_ you  _plan to stay all night?_ _”_ _Will asked back._ “ _How long have you been here?_ _”_

“ _I just arrived._ _”_ _He walked around to the chair on the other side of the bed._ “ _I do plan to stay for the night. Jack Crawford told me you teach tomorrow._ _”_

 _Will shrugged and sagged back into the chair, trying to put his body back into the position it occupied when he had woken up._ “ _I don’t need to be awake to teach,_ _”_ _he said, a little more curtly than he had intended._

 _But Dr Lecter just smiled._ “ _You can rest if you want,_ _”_ _he said, gesturing to the couch on the opposite wall._

“ _No,_ _”_ _Will declined._ “ _I’ll, uh..._ _”_ _He got up, stared at the motionless body on the bed and could not bring his eyes to her face, afraid it would be bleeding at the neck again. The hematoma and petechial bruises from the hemorrhage were still disturbing. It sat at the center of his mind and would not let him think of anything else._ “ _I’ll get a coffee. You want one?_ _”_

“ _Please. Black._ _”_

_When Will returned with the coffees, Lecter had sat down. His left hand was on the bed, near Abigail’s. He thanked Will for the coffee. Hannibal had not searched for his eyes, resting his gaze on his cheek instead, and Will nodded in return._

_He sat down by the right side of the bed and thought of holding her hand too, in her sleep, knowing she would not know. Even when he had closed his fingers on her throat, watching the blood come through, he could not really help her. What made him think this was going to be different? He leaned back into his seat, leaving his hand on the bed, near her arm._

 

* * *

 

The package was on her doorstep when she came home. Beside it were the partial remains of a frog, bowels and legs, behind which Contador stood proudly, his tail wrapped around his body, curled over his paws. He looked at her expectantly and she smiled, and he purred, and she opened the door, holding it open while the cat took the frog in, bringing it to the kitchen. She bent down to place the package on the ground while Contador placed his prey beside his bowl and ate it, voicing a muted growl when Armstrong came to watch him.

She dropped her bag on the counter carefully, slipped her coat off, then carefully carried the large package down to the cellar. It had grown so cool overnight that some infiltrated water had frosted on the bare stone walls near the tiny window on the left. She had wrapped the body in blankets until the sheets arrived. It was almost rigid now, but the specifically sweet smell was perceptible.

Touching the dead young woman’s chest, she pressed down, feeling it cave in slightly under her fingers through the blanket’s wool and closed her eyes, trying to clarify the image coming before her eyes.

Armstrong was meowing in the kitchen and she let go of the body, unwrapping the several sets of patterned sheets and putting them in the wash. Then she climbed back upstairs and went to change.

 

December 25

 

The decision of the National Symphony Orchestra to perform Monteverdi’s _Vespers of 1610_ this late in the evening, as per the traditional praying calendar, had not been welcomed by some of the older members of the attending crowd. The lady sitting beside Hannibal hid a yawn behind her hand, then drew it back into her lap, the jewelry clinging against her purse. She wore Christian Dior perfume, which one specifically, he could not determine. The smell was masked by the faint mix of stomach acid, alcohol and marijuana emanating from the younger man seated behind Hannibal. Turning his head earlier, to assess the crowd as the seats began to fill, Hannibal had noticed the visibly enlarged pupils, the slight tremor in the hands, the dry lips and compulsive swallowing, the general unfocusedness of his demeanor as the young man had torn off a piece of the program and began to fold it into small and smaller squares.

The lights blinked once, then started to dim down until the watchful audience was left in complete darkness. The triumphant notes from the overture filled the room with something like warmth and the deepest form of comfort bloomed into Hannibal’s chest.

Minutes later, the man behind him hit the back of Hannibal’s seat with his knee, when jerking to try and cross his legs. Hannibal did not turn around and felt the sprouting emotion start to wither, as a little more darkness came to him, silent and tenacious. Gradually, the odors and sights around him became muted, as if fading out and he knew he was no longer exactly part of the world. The only good he had now was in the habit of what he knew he would do.

By the ending of the first motet, the man got up, nudging Hannibal’s seat again in the process, and disturbed the rows around him to leave the room. For a moment, Hannibal twisted and untwisted his cufflinks, eyes on the stage. He thought of planning it better. He should find a way to become acquainted with this young man, to know his name, possibly search the orchestra’s members list, but he may not be on it. Then wait, wait and wait, knowing that the plan would unfold in time, somewhere in the future. But the music was cold to him at this point and he rose from his seat as well.

In the lobby, he made note of the two employees standing near the central stairway, both hunched over their phones. Thick gold and red ribbons were wrapped around columns and poles. Elsewhere, there were big present boxes, wrapped in layers of silk paper. Hannibal looked around and eventually headed for the bathroom.

The other man was there. He was easily ten years younger than him and slimmer in frame, but slightly taller, in clothes a nudge too large. The undistinct smell of vomit still hung faintly in the air and he washed his hands and face over the marble sink.

Hannibal let the door close behind him and turned the lock into place soundlessly. The other man only noticed him when he leaned in to wash his hands beside him. “Why take drugs to listen to Monteverdi?” he asked, looking down at his hands, not using soap, but only water.

The man looked up and groaned, his face into his hands, before turning toward him, lifting one arm in an undetermined attempt to push Hannibal away. “Look, dude...” he started.

Hannibal’s fist had already fractured three of his ribs, knocking the air out of his lungs sharply. The man staggered, but Hannibal’s other hand held him upright and close. His eyes registered a single moment of panic before he was backed into the nearest stall with Hannibal’s arm closed around his neck and pressing down and down and Hannibal soon found his eyes empty, and stared into the shimmering, pale lightbulb embedded in the ceiling.

 

* * *

 

Aunt Missie’s house sat on a common street. There was a large patch of green grass in front of it and two big pines. It was similar to Abigail’s own, but more grey and less brown, and they had a pool in the backyard. Her plane landed early in the afternoon on Decembter 25th. It had snowed a few days before. At the airport, she waited near the taxi line watching the snowflakes thaw against the concrete. Aunt Missie came to pick her up. She was not really Abigail’s aunt, but this was also not really family and Abigail did not feel properly like herself either, if she knew still was it felt like, sometimes it just felt unassembled.

When dinner was served, she was made to sit at the children’s table, along with several of her younger great cousins and two of them who were older than her. They were not really children and it was fine too. There was ham, roast, baked potatoes and greens, the other kids put gravy on their greens. The younger children drank bubbling apple juice, but she and some other older ones were given cider or champagne. She stared at her plate, mostly like she had stared at the family members she had been introduced to when she got here, with patience and the strange panic welling inside her at the sight of things too foreign to know, yet too familiar to hope to control.

No one had asked about her neck. Some of the children did not seem to know why she was special. She did not talk much either, she did not remember meeting any of them. Some made jokes and she looked up to smile, attentive, not melting into it, not nearly joyful, but present. At least, she would look reality in the face while it looked at her. After a while, maybe she could make it think she was normal too.

After dinner, she offered an old lady (Aunt Missie’s husband’s aunt, she believed) to help her out with the dishes as to put her mind on something that was not her and her memory. Another kid her age came along with her. His name was Martin, she remembered, he was sixteen. Most of the dishes were still on the deserted tables. Some of it was piled and waiting to go in the dishwasher, some of it was already in the dishwasher. Abigail and Martin took care of the rest: the nice cutlery, the fine glassware, the pots and pans. She washed and he dried. They talked somewhat. They were both good in school. She pretended she still intended to go to college, like her past self assuredly would have. He was already thinking about it. But she was into books and english and history, and he was more into video games and maths and sciences.

“How is it, when you’re in a mental hospital?” he asked, eventually.

Abigail meant to look at him in their reflection in the window above the sink, but he kept his eyes on the glass he was drying. “It’s boring,” she ended up saying. “There’s nothing else to do except thinking about yourself all day.”

“Isn’t there supposed to be people helping you? Like therapists and stuff?”

She scoffed. “There are plenty of them. Sometimes I wish they’d talk about themselves, just to change the subject.”

He smiled awkwardly. “Yeah. They can’t do that, right?”

“No, they can’t.”

There was something in the way he looked down at his hands clutching the towel. It was how he kept trying to look at her, but never brought his eyes up to her face entirely, they jumped to her shoulder and then they went back down.

“What is it?” she asked him, after a minute.

“My mom told me not to ask you about that.”

“About what?”

“About the taste,” he answered, turning to place a champagne glass alongside the rows he had already made.

Abigail paused, her hands in the water up to the wrists. There were no Christmas carols playing, but there was some music in the living room behind them and the sound of conversations overlapping, some loud, some faint, and it wound up around her like a cloak. It was not completely disagreeable. “There’s nothing to say. I could never tell. It’s not really special.”

 

* * *

 

Well into the evening, everyone was invited to gather up in the living room to open the presents. Some of the younger children had been put to bed, some of the adults drank whisky or coffee and yawned, slumped into the couches. Aunt Missie sat by the Christmas tree and handed out the presents. It was an artificial tree, not green, but white and silver. It was decorated with electric blue ornaments and shiny plastic beads garlands. It seemed so cold and strange and Abigail started missing her house, the rugs and the stairs and the small sounds from the floorboards and the walls and the roof and a lump formed in her throat, she was amazed the people around her could not see its shape against the wound, under the scarf, the thumping swelling of memories. She did not cry yet. She received _Jane Eyre_ and an iTunes gift card.

Later, she was lying down in bed on the couch in the basement. She did not sleep and waited until she did not hear anything in the house to let the tears come down.

_Her father led her into the forest early that morning. She thought it was cold and she wondered what she should be helping him with at all, looking at her small hands. Since Abigail had been born, they had used the same artificial Christmas tree, but it would be her tenth Christmas and mom and dad had decided they should have a nicer tree._

_They did not need to go very far in to find it. The tree was exactly as tall as she was, it was brighter and seemed fuller, its branches denser in the morning sun and the bright, sparkling snow. Her father told her to hold the tree’s trunk while he sawed it down. She snaked her hand through the branches and held tight._

_They brought the tree back home and sat down to eat breakfast. Everyone seemed to ignore the blood pooling on the kitchen tiles. It was as if it seeped out from underneath. Abigail started to be worried that her parents did not notice it._

 

December 26

 

Abigail woke up with her cheeks still wet and the smells of Christmas in her nose (her mother’s clementine punch, the pine resin, her father smelling of the cold air outside when he returned from work and she was done with school, the wrapping paper burning in the fireplace). She reached for her phone. It was barely 6 in the morning, the blue haze of dawn had starting to gather outside and it matched the cold light her phone let off where she put it on the pillow beside her head.

She sat on the couch and pulled her bag up on her lap, taking out her change of clothing, wondering how to go about it with Aunt Missie. Sorry, I can’t stay. Then her mind froze, because there would be a why coming. I’m sad, my parents are dead. Not quite that. Christmas makes me feel more alone. Too true. I should leave. I killed a man and buried him in the woods, then I uncovered him and left him to defrost in the open. It was so dark I couldn’t even see his face. Neither. I know how it feels to befriend someone knowing that person will die because of me.

In the end, she said, “I don’t feel very good. It’s better if I leave.”

Aunt Missie understood and said a few reassuring things. Then she asked, “Should I call in Port Haven and tell them you’ll be back?”

Abigail only gave a small smile, feeling like she would look more wounded than she was. “You can ask for Stefanie. She’s going to be the nurse on duty this morning,” she explained. Somehow, she could not cry anymore.

The children had started to wake up and came to the kitchen in their ruffled pajamas, with their unkempt hair and new toys, bright colors and a warmer day coming up. Aunt Missie offered to drive her back to the airport, but Abigail insisted to call a cab.

In the cab, she placed her phone on her lap and waited for a few streets to pass by. The radio played Ella Fitzgerald and the driver hummed with it, he was friendly, but it was visible she did not want to talk. She pulled up Dr Bloom’s number, then she changed her mind and dialed the number Hannibal Lecter had given her, which she could call “For whatever reason, no matter the time,” he had said. It rang and rang and rang and she felt like the bottom of the universe and it was the morning after Christmas, there was no one but her who was alone on that day, was there.

She had still not thought of what to say by the time her call went to voicemail. She had been prepared to answer the question she had supposed he would have asked if he had picked up: “What’s the matter?” So her voice was uneasy. “Hi, it’s Abigail.” The sky above the car and the highway was blue and gold at the edges, traces of pink on the clouds, the warehouses and the empty parking lots they passed by seemed magical in their stillness. “I… I was wondering if you could come and pick me up. From the airport. I’d, uh, I don’t know if I want to go back to Port Haven right now.”

Hanging up, she bit the inside of her lip and started waiting. She did so until she arrived at the airport, then while she stood in line to change her plane ticket, then again when she took her seat, near the window.

She pulled her phone out again before the plane took off. The black screen and her lonely voice on Hannibal Lecter’s voicemail made her look longer at the bright morning outside. Her father had always been there too. Yet there were so many moments when he was not, especially now. She thought of calling no one at all, and then she saw Nicholas Boyle’s _face with the eyes suddenly stopping to stare at her while they were fixed on her face, like they had brought her with him, down and down._ Abigail called Will Graham.

 

* * *

 

It was almost five in the morning when he returned in Baltimore. Once the inanimate body was in the basement, Hannibal Lecter went through the man’s wallet. Joey D’Evangelis, an executive at a cosmetics company. Pictures of a young woman, business cards, credit cards. Much forgotten, much misplaced, banality.

Hannibal went back downstairs and placed the wallet in the incinerator along with his suit jacket, then rolled his sleeves up and prepared an amphetamine injection. He turned the lamp away slightly from the man's face, waiting for him to regain consciousness. His victim's eyelids fluttered and he arched when he realized that his wrists, thighs and ankles were bound down. Hannibal had already opened his shirt and studied the bruise he had made against the ribs. The wheezing sound in the breathing was unmistakable. Not the lungs, then. Nor the liver, nor the stomach, nor the kidneys. Possibly the heart, he considered.

Mr D’Evangelis was waking up now. “Why were you high?” Hannibal asked him, snapping latex gloves on.

The young man’s eyes searched around the room for a moment, but he could only make out steel, the surgical light, the scalpels and needles, and beyond this, only dark and black and silence. “Fuck off!”

Expressionless, Hannibal unclasped the strap holding D’Evangelis’ wrist down and angled his forearm up. “No,” he answered. He broke the wrist slowly, turning counter clockwise. The man twitched, then screamed, then whimpered, then his face spasmed and he became the truth of complete passion overwhelming the body. Hannibal watched him intently and inwardly started listing the name of the carpal bones (capitate, hamate, lunate…). Once the articulation was completely dislocated, Hannibal placed the twisted hand back down and waited a few minutes for Mr D’Evangelis to come back to his senses. When he did, he whined softly, eyes filled with fear now, and not only with pain. “Why are you high?” Hannibal asked again.

For a long moment, D’Evangelis only lolled his head from side to side, his wheezing breath quickening, then receeding again, his broken arm shaking on occasions with remnants of the vivid pain that was hopefully not too tempered. “My wife-…” he stuttered, finally. “My wife-… she died-… I’d go with… her….To the concert-… It’s too hard… now.”

Hannibal leaned over to the side to retrieve a scalpel from the sterile tray. He brought it near the man’s torso and used his left hand’s fingers to prode, searching for the point where the ribcage gave in. “Then why go at all?” he said, once he had found it, pressing it down with his thumb.

D’Evangelis had closed his eyes. There was sweat everywhere on him, shining in the quiet darkness. “Because she’d… want me-… to go,” he muttered.

Turning the lamp back toward the man’s chest, Hannibal nodded approvingly. “It’s a good reason.” He pressed the scalpel down and, it was sharp, he felt it, not cut, but just go down a little, running through flesh like fire.

He stopped in motion when he felt the buzz coming from the inside pocket of his waist jacket. He pulled out his phone and placed it on the tray beside the operating table, looking at it while it rang and Abigail Hobbs’ name flashed in fluorescent blue on the black screen. The scalpel was in, the man’s breathing quivered like a small animal’s flickering heartbeat. Once Abigail had left a message, he played it on speakerphone. Her polite voice seemed to be of a higher pitch on the phone and Hannibal palmed D'Evangelis' chest further down as he listened to her request. For a moment, he considered calling her back immediately. But he decided against it and slid the scalpel back down.

Blood came to D’Evangelis’ mouth, it seemed purple in the surgical light. “Was that… your daughter… on the phone?” His eyes were beginning to roll back.

Hannibal paused for a moment. “Yes, it was.”

D’Evangelis’ breathing was spasmic, a convulsion feeding on air, rather than an exchange of air and blood. His body had already given up on everything, blood palpitating out of the neat vertical cut. Maybe he was blind at this point, or perhaps could his brain no longer decipher the images before his eyes, so that they would seem as abstract as the pain, his terror was as pure as could be. His voice was only a puff of wind. “Does she know who you… are? What you do?”

Hannibal pursed his lips. “Not exactly.”

 

* * *

 

The second body was nothing like the first. Except for the bed sheets, and the wrapping. The tiny blue flowers, their small green stems. Will placed his coffee cup down and caught the twisted reflection of his pale face in the morgue’s metallic walls.

“Only the sheets are the same?” he asked, his voice hoarse from last night’s nightmares. He did not remember them, he wished he could, it would tell him some part of his brain was still working. After the last one, he had got up, he had figured that the dream was not entirely over, because it was blood instead of water that had pooled at his feet in the shower.

Price nodded enthusiastically. “Spring burst,” he said. “The name of the pattern on the sheets,” he explained, meeting Beverly Katz’ raised eyebrow. “It’s pretty.”

“If you’re into grandmother stuff,” the young woman said.

Will clasped the file in his hand, eyes on the bruised, wrecked body. The first one had been emptied, cleaned and embalmed. This one had hardly any skin left intact. He focused on the paleness of the hematomas. “It’s post-mortem?” he said, after a moment.

Zeller nodded. “We’re still checking it out. But, yeah, looks like he was killed at least 72 hours before the… party started.”

Will circled the body, moving closer to where the head rested on the table. “The head’s been crushed from the outside. The joints of the arms and legs have been…” He tilted his head and looked more closely at the right elbow, distended. There was no swelling, but bruising from the outside.

“Popped open,” Price suggested.

“With a hammer or something,” Beverly went on, running a swab under the victim’s lower lip.

“No. They were wedged out,” Will said. He looked at the head, visibly fractured from the temple to the jaw and his own headache began to pound, and he felt like the dead body beat with it. “Did you x-ray the skull fracture?”

“Not yet. Everyone’s out for the holidays.”

Jack’s voice cut in. “I know. The techs will be here in an hour. ” He did not take off his coat, walked in, eyes on the body. Then they slowly moved to Will. “Will,” he greeted.

“Jack,” Will replied on the same tone.

“So? Skull fracture?” Jack prompted him.

Will got hold of his coffee cup and wrapped his fingers around it, but the warmth was gone. “It’s symmetrical. The jaw is dislocated and the teeth and jawbone are fractured. This head was caught in a vice. It was crushed from uniform pressure on all sides. The eyes may have been ejected from the sockets and put back.”

“I’ll check the eye muscles,” Beverly nodded.

“It’s the same guy,” Jack stated, dim.

“Same wrapping, different present,” Will echoed. “Like a secret santa. Guess what’s inside.”

“You think the bed sheets are the key to this?”

Will shrugged. “They are a flagrant similarity. Enough to make us know it’s the same killer. Not enough to broadcast his motives.”

“Why would he have something against broadcasting?” Jack pushed.

Taking his glasses off, Will stared ahead, blank, elsewhere. “There’s a secret. That’s what’s important. It has to stay a secret.”

“What tells you that?”

“Everything, Jack. The enclosing, the post-mortem mutilation. Death is almost…” He exhaled. “Secondary.”

Jack watched him for a time and Will held his gaze placidly, knowing the other man did not want to look at what was inside him, but only surveiled his face and body language for clues, tips and meanings. “Okay,” Jack conceded. “The sheets are all we have. So we’ll start there.” He turned to the others. “Find out where they come from, with what instrument they were cut, if they were folded in an origami pattern. Knock yourselves out and make sure we all have some nice holidays left for us.”

Beverly arched her eyebrows. “Some eggnog left anyway.”

Will’s attention had turned to the body again. There was no abdominal wound this time. Only a small, clean incision above the navel. But they would know more once the autopsy was done. Will thought that, at least, he could not imagine Abigail inflict this kind of damage. Then he saw her _with Nicholas Boyle’s body on the ground, in the snow, the mud and the dead leaves, he was on his back on the ground and she took his arm, lifted it to the sky and bent it backwards at the shoulder, the crack was as loud as the grunts of beasts in the forest of their shared nightmare_ , and he jumped when his phone buzzed.

Looking at the screen, he frowned, then he turned away to go in the corridor. “Hey, Abigail.”

Beverly looked up at Will talking on the phone, his smiles turning into smirks, then turning into worry, then back into smirks. She wondered when he had slept last. Maybe it was this that he liked best, she thought, to know so little about himself it kept his mind off of the things he understood, until he did not understand them at all anymore. Not wanting to speculate about what would happen to him then, she bent down over the closed, rigid eyelids. When she pulled them open, the eyeball fell out slightly to the side, a bit of brain matter flowing from beneath.

She pulled back and sighed. Will walked back into the room, slipping his phone in his pocket. “The eyes are out, right?”

“Yeah,” she nodded.

“It’s a form of torture. Was a form of torture, I guess,” he corrected. “The head was placed in a circular metallic ring or hat, that was tightened with a vice.”

“First, the teeth shatter. Then the eyes bust out. And finally, the brain…” Zeller trailed off.

“Gushes?” Price suggested.

“I get it,” Beverly said. “But who tortures someone post-mortem? Kills the purpose, doesn’t it?”

Will did not answer, ran his hands over his face, then slipped his glasses back on and went to Jack. “This was Abigail. She’s landing in Baltimore in an hour, I’ll pick her up.” He did not wait for an answer and Jack stared after him as he left, clutching the file against his chest.

 

* * *

 

At the airport, Will had spotted her effortlessly in the crowd. She offered a small smile when he got to her. He smiled back, but he could not keep his eyes on her. He took her bag. They did not seem close enough that people would think he was her dad. An unkle, maybe. Around them, families were hugging, people yelled, children slept in the waiting areas’ seats, curled against their luggage, waiting for their flight.

For a long time, in the car, Abigail said nothing. When they neared the exit that would take them to Port Haven, her voice was low, but resolute. “I don’t want to go back there.”

“I figured,” Will said, gently. “Not now, or not ever?”

“You mean, if I have a choice?” she asked back, eyes down on her phone. She was clutching it in her hands.

Thinking of what to say – not I know you don’t like it there, I wouldn’t either, because it seemed too personal, not You’ll be out of there soon, because he did not know that, not Then you’ll never go back, if you don’t want to, because that was not his decision, not We’ll find you a place to live, because no, they wouldn’t, and who was we, him and Hannibal, and the body that they dragged together in the snow, how panicked was she, he began to wonder – he tightened his hold on the wheel. “If you want, you can come home with me. Have something to eat. Then we can go back,” he suggested.

She nodded.

 

* * *

 

He noticed how dark the rings under her eyes were. She was haggard, the pale sky behind her, the big bag in her hand and his house she looked up at only made it worse, ghastly, everything seemed ashen, and Will did not see her breaking Nicholas Boyle anymore, he saw her broken in multiple parts and jerking back into place. “It’s nice,” she said, turning back to him, wincing as a flash of sun came through the clouds.

“People usually think it’s far out,” he mentioned.

She looked at the woods over the hill. “Are those yours?”

He hesitated. “I’m not sure up to what point exactly, but, yeah, part of it.” He opened the trunk and took out the box of files relative to the body they had found last week. “There’s a river. And I do hope it belongs to me, because I fish from it.”

She stood in front of the door, still, holding her bag, eyes still on the horizon, when she said, “My dad didn’t fish. He hated water.”

The key was inside the lock, and Will closed his eyes and sighed. “I have dogs,” he pointed out, trying to focus.

“I know. Dr Bloom told me.”

“Did she tell you I have seven of them?” he asked, just before he opened the door. The dogs rushed through their legs, paying special attention to Abigail’s. For a moment, she froze and watched the swarm. Will set the box down and moved back out, thinking to hold the dogs back. But then he saw her smile and things seemed better, and he smiled too, and Abigail had snow all over her coat from their paws, and then he really smiled and she was laughing.

 

* * *

 

It was already eleven when they sat down at his kitchen table to eat mac and cheese, with brocoli and cauliflower. And it was only once she had a mug of camomille tea set in front of her, that Will thought he could ask. “What happened there?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t belong with these people.”

“Do you still feel like that?”

She curled her fingers around her cup. Outside, it had started snowing. She thought of looking outside the window, but she did not see the need to escape, for now. “Not here, no. Here’s fine.” She frowned. “It reminds me of home. A little. But… in a good way, not too much.” She bit her lip. “Like you remind me of my father. But not a lot, not all the time.”

Will blinked away the image of Garret Jacob Hobbs. “Do you feel any sense of belonging – at all?”

“I’m trying not to really think about it,” Abigail said, smiling faintly. “I suppose it’ll come to me.”

Will swallowed, put his coffee back down, he was not sure whether his vision was blurry, or if it was just because his thoughts were buzzing. He stared at the dark, black liquid, because if he looked up, Garret Jacob Hobbs would be seated at the other end of the table, or in Abigail’s place. _He felt Nicholas Boyle’s skin twist as the knife went in._

“What’s in that box you brought back?” Abigail asked, breaking the silence.

“Files,” Will answered, exhaling. “From the case I’m working on.”

Abigail stared at the closed door of Will’s office. “Can I ask you about your work, or is that confidential?”

“No, no. Not confidential.” He finished his coffee. Buster placed his paws on the edge of Abigail’s chair and she scratched him behind the ears. “I collect evidence from crime scenes, pictures, reports. I interpret them and I profile the people who commit them.”

“You can know people from… the way they kill someone?” she frowned.

He had never liked to think of it in terms of knowing. “Murders are a very specific action, with very particular reasons,” he explained. “You pour everything you are into them. The way you craft them.”

“Like telling what kind of person painted what kind of painting?”

“Maybe,” he sighed. “You probably don’t do art the same way you kill someone. Killing is…” He paused. “Simpler. More precise. You do it with an intent.”

“Like you figured my dad’s intent?” she asked.

“I had a hunch with your father, Abigail. It didn’t work out that good.” He stopped, knowing that it sounded like he was talking about her. “I mean, I hadn’t entirely figured him out.”

With her hair hanging from her temples, down on her shoulders, Will could not exactly see her eyes. “Lounds says you get into their minds.”

He shook his head. “No, it’s... It’s not like that.” If there was a hell, complete with roasting skins, all shades of red and blood, the closed up skies and the _heads strung into vices until the bone creaked, just enough, not to hurt, but to accomplish the work that was needed, the fractures in the bone proof of the life crushed out of them already_ , Freddie Lounds would be at the gate, peering in to take pictures. “It’s not that extraordinary. Everyone can interpret clues. What I do ressembles reading body language. I don’t really notice I’m doing it. I just do it a lot faster than most.” Except it was not speed as much as instantaneousness.

She looked at him curiously now, and he knew that she wondered if he could see it in her, see how she did it with Boyle. He could not bear it and he collected both their plates and brought them to the kitchen, piled them in the sink. Abigail followed him and stood in the doorway.

“Doesn’t it give you nightmares to get to know these people?”

He let the sink fill with water, soap, and foam. “Yes. Yes, as a matter of fact it does.”

“Is this why you see Dr Lecter?”

Will exhaled and frowned, taken by the question, unable to focus entirely on it without remembering the mental image of Hannibal Lecter carrying a body _off into the woods_. “Partly.” Another one of his dogs entered the kitchen cautiously, eyeing Abigail. Will turned to her. “Come say hi, Rockie.” Abigail moved closer. She did not seem particularly afraid of animals, but she was not familiar with pets. “This is Rockie. I found her in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Someone had left her alone with her leash tied around a stop sign.”

“They went to the store, but never came back for her,” she said, holding out her hand for Rockie to sniff.

“Yes. So I waited, all night, until she got used to me. She wasn’t happy, it was cold.”

“I don’t know why someone would leave pets behind like that,” Abigail said, while Rockie ran her nose on the entirety of her hand, moving to her wrist. “You get an animal, you should commit to taking care of it until it dies.”

Will smiled and stopped the water. Things looked better for a moment. “She’s fine now, plays with the others, sleeps okay.”

“The others. Were they all abandoned too?”

He told her about Winston, the lonely road and the leash trailing behind him in the dirt, the headlights of the coming cars scaring him away, the darkness around them, and then he had finally managed to put Winston in the trunk. About Pine found in a pine tree, hidden in the lowest branches, his hair tangled with mud and resin. Will had brought him home and had tried washing him, found he could not, and had shaved the whole thing off. Pine still loved to climb trees. About Buster, taken from a shelter, after his previous owners had left him there. At that point, he had never been out of a cage for more than a few minutes in his life, because his owners had kept him caged all day at home. The first few days, he had spent in a closet in the living room. The other dogs had waited for him outside.

She yawned discreetly and he offered to show her the spare room upstairs. The furniture was sparse. There was the bed under the window, with a dark blue coverlet, a table, an armchair, a white carpet and a closet. The walls were plain wood paneling. It was the main bedroom, in fact, when Will had bought the house. He had never used it. “Is it alright?” he asked.

“Yes,” she nodded. She put her bag in the armchair and went to the window. “I keep thinking I’m going to find another place like home. But I’m not.” When Will looked back up, he found her eyes searching for his. “Could I walk into the woods a while this afternoon, before I have to get back?”

“Sure. I’ll show you.”

“Okay.”

 

* * *

 

The soap foam had climbed a little over the walls of the sink. There was a quiet headache numbing the back of his skull, his shoulders and back were sore from the twisting up in bed the previous nights. But the images were dimmer and the memories were getting foggier. He hoped he would remember less and less from the nightmares as they grew more frequent and more worrying, but now he remembered less and less from his daily life, entire pieces of which had detached from him and floated away.

Winston lifted his head when Will’s cell phone vibrated quietly on the dining room’s table. Will pulled his hands from the water, dried them, checked who it was and answered.

“Will,” Hannibal’s voice said.

“Are you in Baltimore?”

“Not at present, no. I’m on my way back from Washington.” Will heard a faint noise in the background, raindrops on metal, or plastic. “How is Abigail? Is something wrong?” Throughout, Will could not tell for certain if the psychiatrist was worried for Abigail or about her now.

Will leaned against the counter, took his left hand to his forehead, as if it protected him somehow. “Turns out spending the holidays with people she barely knew wasn’t such a good idea.” Outside, it had started to snow again, it clouded his memory. “She seemed tired. I think she didn’t get much sleep.”

“Is she with you now?”

“Yes, we’re home. She’s sleeping upstairs,” Will said. It was a strange thing to say, as if she belonged with him, as if she would stay there, as if she had not killed anyone. And Will reminded himself that he had killed his share.

A brief pause. “May I come and check on her?”

“Of course,” he said. “She said you didn’t call her back.”

Hannibal did not answer. “I’ll be there shortly.” He ended the call and turned to Mr D’Evangelis’ limp body hanging, feet up, head down, blood finishing to pour from his slit throat into the deep copper pot.

 

* * *

 

The snowfall had slowed down, then become dense again. Will Graham had brought the box in the small room near the kitchen he had come to use as an office. On the desk, there were neat piles of copies to correct, papers to review, notes for lectures. The dim light from the window was barely enough for him to see the pictures he pinned to the wall beside the other ones he had already put up. The pictures from the first body were already there.

Buster and Rockie sat for a while in the corridor before they moved on to the living room. Will leaned against his desk and stared, trying to see better. The more he did this, the more he felt like he was an ocean inside, not peaceful, but roaring. He used to think that his affection for Abigail _was the light he could stare at above sea-level, the beam of sun that glittered. But it was another one of the floating corpses downward too._

_Despite trying, he fell deep in the ocean and found the floor covered in flower-patterned sheets, soaked in water and blood. He tried to dig underneath and see what they hid, and it was only more sheets, more flowers. He was starting to feel the weight of his body, or maybe it was the weight of the salted water into his lungs._

Three soft knocks on the door roused him.

As Will opened the door, the dogs gathered around Hannibal, noses raised in expectation. He held a small paper bag.

“Sausage?” Will asked.

After waiting for the dogs to settle around him, Hannibal let go of a piece of meat. Pine caught it. “Black pudding,” he clarified, with a courteous smile.

By the time they went inside, Abigail was coming down the stairs. She smiled slightly when she saw Hannibal, as if things fell into place. But it was not joy yet, it was too careful.

 

* * *

 

The snow had stopped, there was not much of it on the ground, it had been pushed in drifts against the trees and the tall grass. The dogs were due for a walk and Abigail volunteered. Shortly after, Alana called Hannibal. He had slipped off his coat, placed it down on a chair and asked Will about his latest case. While he exchanged a few words with Alana, Will caught glimpses of Abigail trying to outrun the dogs outside. She would not win, he had tried enough on his own, Rockie, especially, was fast.

“I’ll put you on speakerphone,” Hannibal said at last, placing his phone down.

“Will?” Alana said.

“Yeah, here. The clinic called you?”

“Yes, this morning. I’m Abigail’s attending.” There were voices in the background, family, friends, or an airport. Will did not know if she had family, but it felt like she did. “She called you, Hannibal?”

“Yes. It was very early in the morning, I couldn’t answer.” The contrite expression on Hannibal’s face was not pretend, as far as Will could tell.

“Then she called me,” Will said. “I was at Quantico. I drove to Baltimore, picked her up, brought her here.”

“How is she?”

“She’s shaken. I would think it better to let her stay out of Port Haven,” Hannibal said. “For the time being.”

“Will?”

“She said she liked it here,” he said, eyes on Hannibal. “She talked about home a lot.”

There was a moment of silence, except for the dogs playing outside. “She currently tends to convert the loss of family into the loss of home,” Alana explained.

“Substitution is not necessarily regressive,” Hannibal offered.

“I’m uncomfortable with it.”

“She’s not mistaking her family for her home. She clings to what she can keep that doesn’t remind her of what she’s suffered. There’s nothing wrong with not staring pain in the face all the time,” Will said.

Alana sighed on the phone, short, polite. “Abigail tends to be manipulative when she’s upset and mildly depressed when she’s in control. Which one was it today?”

Will and Hannibal exchanged a look over the phone. “The later,” Hannibal said.

“I think this could help her. Comfort her need for trust,” Will added.

There was a pause. Alana was thinking and Will leaned back against the wall and his eyes searched the ground. “I… would have preferred to do this in person,” she started, softly. “Because now it sounds cold when I say that I think you’re projecting, Will.”

For a time, it seemed like a good idea to leave the room, because Will knew Alana said this because she was his friend, and he had forgotten how well she knew him. It did not surprise him, but it did make him sad. He had tried to push Abigail away from death, but now that she was closer to it, she was also closer to him. And he was both glad and horrified at that.

While Will did not answer, Hannibal rubbed one of the buttons on the cuff of his jacket. “Would it not be better for you to come and see Abigail yourself, Alana?” he said. “We could have dinner. If Will agrees.”

Arms crossed on his chest, Will nodded.

“Alright. I’ll have to leave in the evening, though,” Alana said, finally. “My flight is at two in the morning.”

 


	2. 2.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry for posting so late. A milimeter of ice-rain, the following power outage and a conveniently nearly-dead laptop battery is apparently all it takes to screw up my neat posting schedule. Grrrrr.
> 
> This aside, I didn't note it on the first chapter, but I placed Christmas after Trou Normand just because it seemed like a cool, wintery, family spot on the show. But we see a (ridiculous) Christmas tree in Hannibal's house in Futamono (2x06), so the timing is entirely screwed here.

When he had first been into Will’s home to care for the dogs, Hannibal had explored every room. At this moment, he had been in the kitchen as well. Most of its content was unsurprising, given what he knew of Will’s cultural background. The basics owned by someone who cooked, but not with refinement, who was knowledgeable of sophisticated things, but not indulging in them, disdainful of both the vulgar and the luxurious.

“Most of the food I keep is for the dog food I cook,” Will said, from where he stood in the doorway.

“You cook for your dogs?”

Will nodded.

Hannibal stood in front of the open refrigerator, his lean silhouette bathed in the cold glow from inside. “Everyday?”

“In batches. I usually do it twice a week.”

Peering inside, Hannibal caught sight of three pots of ricotta cheese between a bunch of spinach, not so fresh, partially hidden by a few cans of beer. “It’s a marked dedication.”

Will was leaning in the doorway, not as far away as he could have been, but nearly so. He was slightly more ajar than in the more official setting of Hannibal’s office. So when Will smiled and breathed out a laugh, not nervous, but something else, Hannibal felt his own smile broaden. “Having a lot of dogs like I do, if you don’t commit, there’s no point. They’ll control your life.”

Taking his eyes back to the well-ordered contents of the refrigerator, Hannibal waited a moment and said, “When I first met you, I had somewhat the wrong idea.” It was true, but when Will would push, he would somewhat lie.

“What was your first idea?” Will pushed.

“That you were slightly less structured,” Hannibal replied, finding that it was not entirely lying, but certainly omitting much. He had not believed the quick speed at which Will would tolerate the presence of violence in his life, not only in his own, but in the ones of others around him, others he cared for. He had also not believed, at first, how fast he had wanted to become the violence living inside Will’s mind.

“And you found that interesting?” Will frowned. “Does it mean you don’t anymore?”

“Interest involves distance. It places appreciation in an object worthy of observation. Given the recent events, it has changed.”

“Into what?”

Hannibal thought for a moment, making sure not to look at Will while he did. Trying to name the infinite amount of what was heavy and strong within him, he would have gone for a specific mix of affinity and affection, because Will deserved the truth, at least the part compatible with the regions his mind walked. But then, it would have been better to try and describe the strenght of these feelings, without having to give them a name. And all in all, he believed they would have required a complex construction to find an appropriate expression. He had not yet decided on the words to use when the front door opened and Abigail came back inside along with the dogs and the clicking of their nails on the floorboards.

The dogs swarmed the kitchen. Abigail followed, her cheeks a bright red and her breath coming a bit short. “They really like to play a lot,” she said.

Will smiled, reached down for Winston, who crowded his legs. “They’re not used to have people in the house. And I might be too old to play with them as much as you.”

Hannibal waited for the dogs to settle down. Abigail’s smile, bright, distracted, mirrored Will’s, more hesitant. It was only the middle of the afternoon, but it was beginning to get dark outside. “Dr Bloom called, Abigail,” he said, at last. “You were inquired after at Port Haven.”

She turned slightly to Will, hesitant. “I have to go back now, don’t I?”

“We suggested that you could stay here. Until your group therapy resumes on the 28th,” Hannibal offered.

“If you want, Abigail,” Will said.

Looking around, eyes on the three dogs at her feet, then through the window and outside, Abigail was thinking, perhaps of whether to stay, perhaps of what or how to say it. “It would be nice. Won’t you be working?” she asked Will.

“I’m never really taking a break from work.”

“Dr Bloom will join us for dinner,” Hannibal said. “She should be here in a little over an hour.”

Will massaged his right temple. Hannibal wondered how bad could the headaches be at this point. He had often tried to associate a smell with pain, but he knew the only molecules detectable would be the ones from inflammation. “So we can go into the woods for a walk,” Will said. Abigail smiled in a flash. She still seemed tired, as she took her coat from where she had folded it just moments ago over the back of a chair. But she liked woods, Hannibal knew. “I’ll get you a hat though, it’ll be getting colder,” Will went on, walking out to the living room.

Turning on the lights, Hannibal appreciated their clear but not too harsh warm white and removed his suit jacket, placing it neatly over the chair where Abigail’s own had been. As he started rolling his sleeves and walked along the kitchen island, eyeing the sink on his right and the oven on his left, Abigail asked, “Are you making dinner?”

“Apparently.”

“What are we having?”

Pondering how much she remembered from the first meal he and Abigail had shared together, Hannibal was about to speak, when Will spoke from the doorway. “Mustn’t be a lot of options, right?” he observed, his winter coat on, wearing a black wool hat, holding out another gray one for Abigail.

“The most beautiful works of art were often created under severe constraints, either in time, conditions or material,” Hannibal replied.

“We used to eat shepherd's pie on Christmas, at home,” Abigail said. Hannibal stared at her and she met his eyes calmly. She did remember, it seemed. “I’d like something else.”

Smoothening the rolled shirt sleeve above his right elbow, he smiled, eyes locked with Abigail’s still. “Then something else it'll be.”

 

* * *

 

“Lounds wants to talk about it in the book,” Abigail started, stepping high over a rotting stump.

“Your family visit?” Will said.

“Yeah. I don’t know what to tell her, now. I was supposed to take notes,” she went on.

“You can make up whatever you want. Or ask her to do it, she’ll be happy to.”

“I was thinking of telling her what happened. For real,” she said. “How I didn’t feel like I could be with family again.”

The older man pursed his lips and avoided her eyes. “Reality is almost never a good story, Abigail.” He was thinking she would tell Lounds about coming here, about his dogs, his remote house.

She shrugged, changing subject. “Is it strange that I’m more worried about what I’m going to tell her than about not standing to be with family?”

Will chuckled. “I’m, uh, not a great barometer for strangeness,” he said. “Do you still feel detached from what goes on around you?”

“Mostly detached from everything people want me to care about.”

They kept walking in silence for a while. “Don’t worry,” he said, and how could she not worry, he thought. Somewhere in his mind, _always, every moment of every day, she was still lying on the floor of her kitchen in Minnesota with her throat slit open, and in so many of these moments now, Will just found himself staring down at her, Hannibal behind him, motionless as well._ All of these sparks of violence and cruelty, he figured, _would eventually fill his mind to the brim, then overflow it and spill out into the world._ “It’s going to end, at some point. The detachment. And you’ll feel better with yourself.”

They did not speak again before they reached the first trees.

The woods were not very dense. Abigail was mindful of her step, Will reminded her to look down at the snow, it could be hiding branches or holes, _like the mind, right?_ It was not really clear where they were going. Abigail had asked Will to show her how far the trees went, and he had said that he had never walked until that point. The snow was not really deep, but their boots got stuck easily in the dead leaves and frozen mud beneath.

Before leaving, he had insisted on taking a rifle, in case they met a coyote. The dogs would fight with it and Will would fire it in the air, it was usually enough to scare them away. They were about half a mile from the house when Will had needed to hold Pine and Goggle close while four lost gooses took flight from a nearby, partly-frozen pond, and Abigail had taken the gun from him. It hung from her shoulder. It reminded her of times spent with her father for a few steps, but the smells were not the same.

It was strange, Abigail thought, what her life had become. She did not use to like the woods this much, she thought she liked them because her father did and she enjoyed being with him. But now, she just found the trees comforting. She suddenly stopped thinking, and became worried again, when Will said, “I know.” He had stopped a few steps behind her, beside a pale fallen trunk. “I know about Nicholas Boyle.”

For a moment, she blinked and looked down. “I thought he was going to kill me,” she whispered, in the end.

“He might not have. Did you think about that?”

Her face hardened. “A lot.” Then, she looked away at the edge of the woods. Beyond the trees, she could still see the field, the blond, dead tall grass and, tiny against the yellow horizon, lost, gray and away, the house.

She must have looked scared, because Will said, “It’s alright, Abigail.” He held both his hands in front of him, open.

“Hannibal said you’d protect me,” she said, sounding both disappointed and surprised that it could not be true, or that it would be.

Will’s face twitched at that and he stared away at two of the dogs, barking at a squirrel in a tree. “You’re not leaving me much of a choice.”

She was going to say something bad, but suddenly, it left her, like a balloon, going up in the sky and never coming back, the anger was gone. “I didn’t want this. Any of this,” she replied. Her cheeks felt warmer and she realized she was crying. And how to say that she did not want to be the helpless child of her father, but that the only thing left for her to be outside of that was a murderer.

Will did not say what was on his mind, that sometimes, he wished her father had killed her, so that his ghost would not hang over both of them. _Somewhere in the woods, Garret Jacob Hobbs was waiting for them, standing between two trees, and_ Will’s head throbbed. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said, instead. “And I _will_ look after you.”

She turned her back to him at this point, drying her cheek with the heels of her hands, and walked up a small hill, with dry pine cones crumbling under her feet, mingling with patches of sludged snow. He noticed she held the gun close and called after the dogs. Winston stood by his side, and he followed Abigail over the hill.

After it, there was a more thickset part of the woods, with a lot of silver birches. Deers came often to eat the young tree bark.

The first thing he noticed when he reached the top of the hill, was Abigail standing at the foot of it, one knee in the snow, gun raised and pointed at something in the distance. He could not make it out. He made his way to her, trying to still and hush the dogs, but Pine growled insistently beside them.

They stood together in silence, Will still not seeing what Abigail saw. But there was something. _A dark spot, half hidden between two tight groups of birch trees. It was tall and, as it moved forward, Will recognized it immediately. The slender black legs, covered in feathers, the head always held high, so that it did not really look like an animal. And, as always, it looked straight at him, even if it did not. He felt seen through and it was not scary, but_ that scared him, and why would an animal see him. He thought of omens of death and infinite blackness, but no thoughts were strong enough.

“Do you see it?” he asked Abigail. He hoped she could. It was hard to see in the near darkness of the winter afternoon.

He closed his eyes briefly and exhaled with solace when she answered, “Yes, I see it. I’ll get it.”

Will locked eyes with the stag and the shot fired. He blinked and it was gone. Abigail lurched forward, trying to beat the dogs to her prey. When she reached it, she held a ruffed grouse high above her head, its feathers bloodied around the neck. Around her, the dogs clamored in triumph and excitement.

It had gone entirely dark already when they went back to the house. On their way back, Rockie and Buster started after something in the snow. Whatever it was, it was fast and sprinting in zigzag patterns in the tall grass. Shortly after, they heard a short, high-pitched whimper and Buster came back to them with a rabbit caught in his jaw. Abigail was carrying the grouse, her small gloved hand holding its feet and she smiled widely when she saw the dog and its prey. They walked together toward the house, Will slightly behind, telling himself that it was normal that Abigail was used to death, she had hunted before. But he did not believe it entirely, there was something else _working inside, under the wrapping, but why would someone wrap a body at all? to protect it? from what?_

He had forgotten his aspirins home, so he clenched his teeth as the headache tipped over from the back of his head to the center, somewhere near the right ear.

 

* * *

 

Ever since she had retired, they had suggested she should keep busy. She herself had recommended it to colleagues. It had seemed different at the time. She became a volunteer at the public library, at the museum and here, at the university. She had given some classes before she had obtained tenure at Baltimore Mercy, she had always enjoyed the discomfort created in her students when she showed them the bone saw for the autopsy, the first time.

There were different reactions. Some would be brave, some would be afraid, some would try to show nothing at all and succeed, some would try to show nothing and fail, some seemed like it was not the first time they had seen this. What she liked most was that there was no way to tell which of them would be good at it. The autopsy required a specific kindness. If not, it would be disgusting, slimy, like killing then all over again.

“You used to teach here?” the young man asked her.

She stopped writing and looked up. He seemed a little under twenty-five, afro-american, under too much stress to care to be polite or not, in his second year of residency, if she had to bet. “Yes. I retired 4 years ago.”

He eyed her for a time, hesitating if he should ask her or not. He decided he could. “Could you look into this one? The family changed their mind. There’s some legal issues,” he said.

She took the file from his hands. “Sure,” she said, smiling, looking over her glasses at him.

He did not thank her and left. She watched him leave, then rose to go to the refrigerators on her right, looking for the right drawer, pulling the sliding table out. A young lady, long red hair, skull smashed in. Legal issues, he had said. She would need a stretcher, and there would be a body missing on the report she would have to be filing. She thought of the young man again.

 

* * *

 

In the background, the music kept playing. Faint jazz, mixed with people talking. Bella had left the others to sway, mingle and laugh when she had started coughing, excusing herself, pretended she had swallowed wrong, gone to the kitchen. Jack had talked with Bella’s brother for a few minutes still.

Jack found her in the kitchen, her back to the sink and she smiled weakly. He frowned, walked closer and she showed him a napkin with blood in it. Jack tried to keep his face from looking grave, but he felt like he was sinking. “We knew it would happen,” Bella said.

“You knew it would happen,” Jack said.

She shook her head, ignored his sharpness, so much grace, all poise and daylight. “I feel fine.”

“There could be a burst vein in your lung,” he insisted.

“And if it was an artery, they could slowly fill with it and I would run out of breath,” Bella added softly.

Jack turned away, amazed that the music was still playing, while everything inside him was silent, not dead, but expecting it. “Often, it feels like you’re elsewhere and I’m wondering what you think about. I like to imagine you remember moments you loved or think about things you fear, but you think about how you’re going to die,” he told her, not really knowing how he could blame her, just angry the thoughts existed, and so close to him too, almost like they were taunting him, reminding him he was powerless.

The music shifted to a Patsy Cline song. “Yes.”

And Jack knew this is how it would be until the end. “And it doesn’t scare you.”

“It does scare me,” she corrected. “I’m trying to control it. Like an immersion. If I’m soaked into it, it might be less… singular, when it comes.”

He moved closer. “You can’t demand that I not be scared with you.”

She smiled. “I am, Jack.”

“I can’t be this strong.”

Bella turned away, her eyes considering the sink before her, searching for droplets of blood in it. “Knowing everyone feels like they owe me strenght, it’s like being in a spotlight with everyone looking at me.”

“Did you tell your parents?”

“They don’t need to know.”

“You’ll wait until it breaks you.”

Bella clutched at the napkin rolled tight in her hand, red showing through. “Weakness makes me feel like an object. I thought I could just as well wait until I am one, before everyone knows,” she said, her voice strained. She started coughing and, as usual, it was short and dry, but in the way her eyebrows arched, Jack knew she was searching for air inside her lungs and not finding it. He held out his hand but she shook her head.

She pressed the napkin to her mouth, but it came away clean and, eventually, the fit receeded. She drank a glass of water. “We should get back there,” she said.

Jack nodded. “Okay.” Bella got back to her seat at the dinner table, beside her mother, and he took a moment to watch her, perfection and motion come together, solitude and a fortress of pain in the depths of her chest where he could not see. He would have to wait until it came to the surface.

He was ready to follow her when his phone buzzed. He retreated in the corridor to read and reply to Katz’s text message. They had four suspects who had bought large amounts of these patterned sheets in the right timeframe. She was trying to pull a team together for interviews on the next day. Jack hesitated, then sent the leads to Will, along with a message to go with them.

 

* * *

 

A cab drove up outside and, shortly after, Hannibal heard Alana open the door and call out for Will, first, then for Abigail. He stepped out of the kitchen to greet her and she smiled, mildly surprised, maybe, but also relieved, to some degree. He explained that Will and Abigail had gone out in the woods before dinner, and bent down to take her bags for her. One was her suitcase. Two other ones contained gifts, he noticed. “For Abigail,” she said. “It’s a fur hat and muff, and a cashmere scarf.” She had put her hair up in a loose bun that sat just above the nape of her neck.

“Perfect for a lady,” he approved.

She joined him in the kitchen and held out a smaller, heavier bag. “And I also brought booze.”

“My savior,” he said, smiling broadly. “I must admit Will favors the cheapest beer imaginable.”

She placed the four bottles down on the counter. A Moët et Chandon, a Chateauneuf-du-Pape, a Beaujolais and a Pinot gris. “Champagne seemed traditional and I didn’t know what we’d be eating,” she explained.

“Fish, most likely.” Hannibal inspected the Chateauneuf bottle.

Alana rounded the kitchen island to stand opposite Hannibal. “So, since we’ll have the Pinot with dinner, we can get started now on the red,” she said. “Beaujolais?”

Bowing his head in agreement, Hannibal reached for the corkscrew in a drawer. “A most wise suggestion,” he said, getting two glasses from a cupboard.

Hannibal rubbed the dust from the glasses and poured the wine. They toasted and drank in silence. The quick bolognaise Hannibal had started was still simmering. The ricotta-based cheese cake was in the oven for its first bake. “You sounded surprised that I’d be coming, on the phone,” Alana said, eyes on the mist forming in the window from the cooking. “You still look minimally surprised,” she added, turning to study him. “Will told you what happened between us, didn’t he?”

He did not deny. “Obviously, there’s been some new developments I wasn’t aware of,” he said. “Did you speak with him?”

Alana’s mind went back to Will’s dark classroom and her swaying, back and forth, toward him and away from him. “I… I told him I wanted to be his friend.” She closed her eyes. “I’m afraid I’m sending mixed signals.”

“Did he complain of it?”

“No. He thanked me for being honest with him,” she said, and it sounded sad.

Sipping from his glass, Hannibal smiled slightly and said nothing, moving to start peeling the first of three zucchinis.

“Are you still seeing Anne-Sophie… de Montigny?” Alana asked, after a time, wincing as she hesitated on the family name.

Hannibal lifted his eyes to her, halfway between reserved and curious. “De Marandon,” he corrected. “And yes,” he answered. “Why are we going from your feelings for Will to my personal life?”

Alana flashed a small smile in apology. “I’m overstepping, aren’t I?”

“Delicately. But there must be some strategy at work. I’m willing to let it unfold,” he offered.

“I’ll try and be more open next time,” Alana said.

“No harm done. What’s the strategy?”

Sighing, Alana placed her glass down, half of the wine gone already. “What happened with Will… got me thinking about what I searched for in a relationship.”

Hannibal dried his hands on a towel. “Criterias and expectations are not mandatory. Sometimes relationships just happen.”

“I realized I had trouble imagining myself in a non-therapeutic relation,” Alana rephrased.

“A mild case of occupational psychosis?” Hannibal suggested, with a knowing smile.

She shook her head, fingers curling around the stem of her glass. “I offered to be Will’s friend and I don’t even know what I meant by that.”

“That you’ll be there, Alana,” Hannibal said, eyes on her. “So will I.”

It was dark outside now, but the misted windows stopped her from seeing her reflection in them. The air was thick with smells of cooking. Hannibal carved tiny spirals out of the zucchinis. “I wish he wasn’t afraid as much. And I know I can’t take the fear out of him. I also have no idea what he’d be like if he wasn’t afraid,” Alana said, mostly to herself, pausing to look at the print of her fingers on the glass. “How do you deal with the conflict between your profession and your personal needs?” she asked, then.

“I’ve opted for the simplest solution: avoidance of the later,” Hannibal replied, focused on the knife.

Alana arched her eyebrows. “I didn’t think you’d be the cynical type.”

“For those who understand the human mind as much as we do, or who think they understand it, involvement is absolute or strictly limited. I prefer the later one.”

Cocking her head, Alana realized she had finished her glass. “Your relationship with Will isn’t strictly limited,” she noted.

“No, it’s not.”

“This conversation wasn’t about what I thought it was about,” Alana said, quiet, frowning. “And I drank that too fast,” she added, gesturing to her empty glass.

All smooth movements, Hannibal placed the knife down and went to the sink, filled a glass of water and placed it before her, assisting, comforting. Alana licked her lips, sipped the water, kept thinking.

“Hannibal, I think you’re doing what I’m trying not to do,” she said, at last.

“With Will?” he said, gathering plates from the cupboard on the left. He piled them on the counter and searched for matching ones.

She tucked a strand of hair back into her complex bun. “With Will and Abigail both. You’re keeping them close. You surround yourself with broken people. One day, you’ll wake up among the scattered pieces of the people you’ve cared about.”

Hannibal’s face went blank and calm for a moment. “Will and Abigail are no more broken than I am.”

She smiled sadly, and sadness looked strange on her, Hannibal noticed, as if it did not entirely permeate her. “Who says you’re not broken?”

“Sanity is relative,” he said, neither approving, nor disapproving.

Alana broke the gaze before he did, looking out the now blurred window. “I didn’t mean to ruin the mood.”

“Don’t apologize for sharing your worries for, or about, your friends,” Hannibal said, warm again.

While Hannibal stirred the thick sauce, Alana took in her surroundings. The living room where Will slept was not lit, except for the entrance, and she could not distinguish the chimney and the fireplace. She wondered if he had fixed it already. She also wondered if she could sit at the table with him and ignore everything that was between them. “Will can’t be comfortable having this here?” she asked, eventually.

“Maybe not entirely, indeed,” Hannibal agreed. “But Abigail genuinely likes it. And he likes that she likes it.”

“I’m glad you’re here with Abigail.”

“You don’t trust Will with her?” Hannibal asked.

Alana thought of her answer. She was considering saying yes, when they heard a gunshot in the distance.

 

* * *

 

Hannibal and Alana waited for them on the porch when they got back to the house. The dogs gathered around them, except for Buster, who stayed behind, carrying the rabbit. Abigail smiled brightly at the sight of Alana, and Will smiled too, but he pushed his face down into his scarf. The world shook at its edges, coming closer, then going back far away, then snuggling tight against him.

They reached the porch and Abigail held the grouse out for Hannibal. “Can we have it for dinner?”

“Of course, we can,” Hannibal said, examining the bird.

Alana went from the prey in Abigail’s hand to the one in Buster’s mouth. “Are they gonna eat it?” she asked Will.

He shook his head. “No, they’re just going to play around with it.”

On cue, Buster began to shake the rabbit around erratically. Will moved forward and coaxed the dog until he stopped growling and let him take the rabbit out. It was still alive, legs kicking weakly, the rest of it immobile except for its panicked, avid breathing.

Alana stepped aside, with Abigail, while the animal whimpered. “Why don’t you come inside, Abigail? I brought you some Christmas presents.”

Will waited until they were both inside to break the rabbit’s neck swiftly. Hannibal watched his fingers tighten around the throat, the motion of his wrist, the way his eyes did not avoid the animal’s fix gaze.

 

* * *

 

Alana wished she had times to wrap the gifts properly. But Abigail unpacked them happily at the dining room table and Alana told her how to fit her hands inside the fur muff.

“Are you trying to gain my trust again?” Abigail asked. Alana was shocked once more at how quickly the younger woman could go from joy to questions, from feelings to thought.

“If I was, I would only be trying to maintain the trust we already have,” Alana said cautiously, careful to not sit back and show distance, remain close, but stay peripherical, don’t step in, nor out. “You may have trouble with that.”

Abigail pulled her hands out of the muff and smoothed the fur, thoughtful or just sad, it was hard to tell. “It’s going to come back? Knowing feelings from each other?”

“It’s a possibility of human relationships, that people can like us and do good things for us with no ulterior motive.”

“But you have an ulterior motive with me,” Abigail opposed, gently.

The thought swirled a moment in Alana’s head, to tell Abigail that this ulterior motive was to make her be happy, but she knew it would have been false. She just smiled and said, “In a way. And in another way I bring you gifts.”

Then, Abigail insisted to try on the hat and asked what kind of fur it was. As they talked, Alana was able to move the conversation towards gifts, previous Christmas and family rituals, even if Abigail was no fool and they both knew it.

 

* * *

 

As Alana settled at the dining room table with Abigail, Will went to the kitchen. His breath caught in his throat at the sight of Hannibal stirring something on his oven. The walls started to feel too close, and the dogs were puzzled, running from one room to another, galvanized by the long walk outside, the new people inside. He reached for the aspirin bottle he kept by the sink. He leaned against the kitchen island, trying not to think of the unknown meals cooking in his own pans. “Can you tell me what to do, so I can focus?”

The other man smiled slightly, placed the squash sitting on the counter before Will, along with a cutting board and knife. “Dices. An inch in size.”

“Okay,” Will nodded.

Hannibal reached for the opened bottle of wine and poured a glass. “And please have this.”

For a time, Will cut the squash in half, took the pips and center out while Hannibal plucked the grouse firmly. The feathers were hard, the blood was fresh. Abigail had caught it at the neck, most of its head had been blown away, but there were no pellets in the body. None of them spoke. Will wondered if Hannibal was trying to hear what Abigail and Alana were talking about as much as he was. The words were blurred out by the ambient bubbling and simmering noises. Then, Will thought it would be best to speak his mind. “I didn’t expect her to tell me. About Nick Boyle,” he started in a low voice. “Was she worried about telling me?”

His eyes not leaving the dead bird, Hannibal answered, “A little. I reassured her.”

“What did you say?”

When Hannibal towelled his hands, there was blood on them and on the towel. He moved to cut the grouse’s head off swiftly. “That you wouldn’t expose her, because you understand,” he explained. “Was I wrong?”

Will shook his head. He had already finished his wine, not feeling the warmth from it. He felt just as cold as he had outside, as if it had gone under his skin and not come out. His head felt lighter though now, probably from the aspirins and the wine. “I wanted to protect her from that,” he whispered.

“From death?” Hannibal scoffed. “Not in your line of work. Not given her own life.”

Eyebrows arched, Will kept dicing the squash, his mind torn between the task and _the image of Abigail, standing in the corner of the room, folding a flower-patterned sheet, then another one, then another one_. “Do _you_ think you can protect her?”

A brief shadow passed on Hannibal’s face, that Will did not catch. “I will try. I may fail. But then you’ll be there.”

The dices were done. Will’s hands were orange and he reached for a clean towel, feeling the squash juice dry on his fingers, sticky, not like blood, but still. “You really picture me saving her?” he said, somewhere between mockery and melancholy.

“Yes, I do.”

Holding his wine glass out for a refill, Will said, “I don’t feel all that competent in the matter.”

 

* * *

 

Decorations were not a good idea. No matter how they looked, they would remind Abigail of what she had lost, Alana thought. But once the table was set, it seemed empty. “Will, do you have candles?” she asked.

“Sure. Upstairs,” he nodded. Eye-contact was still rare, Alana found, but Will seemed a tad more comfortable. He placed the last wine glass on the table.

The room where he brought her was stacked with piles of boxes of all shapes and sizes. On the right, there were motor parts and tools on tables and racks. The small window showed the nightsky, clean, pure, homely, and the room smelled less of dogs and more of undisturbed dust. In the moonlight, the man’s face seemed even paler than it was, his skin had a waxen tone, like if it was both solid and close to melting down. “I’ve said it before, but you do look sick,” she said, slightly softer than she had meant to.

“Fever’s always worse in the evening,” Will explained, eyes on a pile of boxes. He reached for a shoe box that sat at the top of it, smiling briefly at Alana.

Her concern reached him like a distant light in the darkness, the home to the boat out at sea, but he lived on the sea and he would never return to the lighthouse at this point, its warmth and peace forgotten and all hopes abandoned.

He handed her the box. Inside, there were a dozen new candles, tightly wrapped together, and some partially burned ones. “What do you know about Hannibal?” he asked.

Alana placed the box down. “Are you asking because the fact that I know means something, or because you really want to know?” she asked back.

“A little of both,” Will said, with an uneasy smile.

She ran her fingertips along the edge of the table near her and observed the faint layer of gray they collected. “Did you have friends, before, ever?”

Tilting his head down, Will crossed his arms, leaned slightly back. “I’ll really look sad if I say no,” he said. “I have you.”

She smiled weakly. “I didn’t think you would like Hannibal. But you seemed to bond strongly over Abigail,” she went on.

“You say it like it worries you.”

Thinking back of Hannibal Lecter’s and Will Graham’s distinct forms of solitude, Hannibal’s more socialized than most, Will’s more radical than most, Alana did all she could not to think of her own large, empty house. Of the plane she would take in a few hours, bringing her to see a family that was always at the back of her mind, always there whenever she worked, even in an abstract form, but who remained alien and distant in so many ways. “I haven’t known either of you to be bonding with anything, over the years,” she said.

“He follows me where my mind takes me. I don’t know if that’s a good thing. To know how to do that,” he replied, hoping to avoid the topic of Abigail and bring things back to the _blackness seeping from underneath, climbing around his feet, right now, it reached his calf, if it was already up there, then the house must already be filled with water and everyone should be dead_.

“Are you glad to have him with you there?” Alana’s voice brought him back.

“I feel like you’re expecting me to say no.”

She watched him. “I’d want you to say that,” she said. “Because he’s not really with you. You’re alone in what you do.”

And Will knew that Alana was not trying to separate him from Hannibal to protect Abigail, but to protect them from each other. Abigail would be fine. “Don’t worry. I won’t contaminate him. What I do… it’s locked inside me.”

“You know it’s not just him I’m worried about,” she insisted, quiet, gentle, but Will doubt she would always be there for him, and she probably should not be, and she would never promise him that. He picked up the box while she closed the light. “He swears in French, when he’s really angry,” Alana said, once the door was closed behind them. Will turned a puzzled look at her as they went down the tiny corridor. “What?”

He shook his head, amused. “I’m... trying to picture what that looks like.”

“I’ve only witnessed it twice in the last ten years. He’s quite a private person, even if he doesn’t wear a no trespassing sign around his neck.”

“Like I do,” Will completed.

There were no candlesticks proper in the house, so they put the candles down in glasses, holding the bottom of each one over flame until it melted and would stick down. There were over twenty of them and, once they were all lit, they radiated heat around the table. While Abigail helped Hannibal in the kitchen, Alana told Will about her Irish grandmother. At Christmas, she would decorate the windows with candles and let them burn all through the night. It was meant to be a prayer, and whenever a candle went down, somewhere a soul was lost. As long as they burned, everyone was safe. She remembered the cooled wax on the windows’ edges and the furniture in the morning.

What if he did not kill them, Will wondered, while his mind drifted off among the superimposing images of _garbage bins, sheets and maggots, what if he thought he could maintain them in life, here, just as if they were sleeping, right, blood drained out of them, death removed alltogether, until all that was left was the tranquil light of morning coming to get them?_

 

* * *

 

After pausing to stare at the squash soufflés Hannibal pulled out of the oven, Abigail went back to nesting the spirals of zucchinis together. “Why didn’t you pick up my call?” she asked, at last.

Hannibal seemed to think for a moment. “I wanted you to trust Will. You need to know you can.”

“I can’t trust him,” she answered.

The grouse had been roasted whole, stuffed with bread crumbs, lard and apple. It seemed smaller to Abigail now, less glorious than when it was hanging from her hand. “Because you don’t have anything against him?” Hannibal asked back. “If this is what you consider trust, then you don’t trust me.” She did not answer, moved on to the second plate. “He’s told you he knew about Nicholas Boyle. How did you react?”

She exhaled slowly. “I didn’t feel threatened. He was just sad.”

“Were you also sad?” Hannibal said, tasting the bitter chocolate sauce for the grouse.

“No,” she stammered. “I’m afraid I’ll hurt him.”

 

* * *

 

It seemed to Will like his house was not his anymore, like the objects changed shapes or moved to other places against his will. The dogs reacted well to people. He should manage too. And the wine helped somewhat.

Dinner was squash soufflés and raw zucchini spirals topped with the _minute_ bolognaise sauce as entrées, then the grouse with chocolate sauce and, for dessert, lemon-scented cheese cake. Seeing Hannibal’s food in his plates was strange, but Will’s thoughts could not follow enough to assemble into anxiety. Alana and Hannibal did most of the talking, Abigail asking occasional questions and, gradually, things seemed calmly festive. By the time they reached dessert, he read Jack’s message on his phone and let the new informations sit at the back of his mind. He had not replied that he would not go, but he had no intention to leave. He preferred to wait for the next body.

Will’s mind was drawn back into the conversation when Abigail asked Hannibal if he had any family.

“I have an unkle.”

“You mean, your parents are dead?” Abigail asked. Will noticed Alana listening intently enough. He wondered dimly if she knew that before.

It was exactly the same peaceful bluntness on Hannibal’s face than when Will had asked him these same questions. “I was very young when they died,” Hannibal said, softly.

Abigail took her eyes down to her empty plate, pulled her hand away from her champagne glass. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be,” Hannibal reassured her. “As it ages, pain becomes nothing but a trace of obscurity in one’s mind.” His eyes were locked with Abigail’s, as if he spoke only to her. “I was sent to an orphanage, where…” He paused for a split-second and Will saw something flicker in his eyes. “I stayed for the better part of a year, before my unkle returned from Japan and took me in.”

“Do you still see him?”

Hannibal smiled, polite, but cold. “His accountant speaks to mine about questions regarding the management of the Lecter estate. He holds the title, but I inherited close to half the shares.”

“Title?” Alana asked, eyebrows arched.

“Count.”

“Wow,” Abigail said.

Hannibal poured the rest of the champagne in Will’s and Alana’s glasses. “It’s always impressive for Americans. But it’s almost entirely meaningless, I assure you.”

Will’s eyes went back to Abigail. She fidgeted with the cuff of her shirt, not nervous, maybe just thinking, constantly. But he wondered what the thoughts were. There had been no thoughts at all, when she had proudly carried the grouse, when she had smiled at the captured rabbit. _She floated on the snowy fields, like she belonged there._ Here, she seemed trapped, waiting, watching, trying to measure the world, see if she still fit into it as words flew around them.

 

* * *

 

Later, while Abigail had gone to the bathroom, Alana began. “There’s a federal program that promotes and funds housing for patients released from psychiatric care,” she said. “I’m going to make an application for Abigail.”

“Her own appartment?” Hannibal asked. “Are you sure she’s ready?”

“Supervised appartment,” Alana pointed out. “And the deadline for applications is in February. It’ll be March by the time I get an answer. She already wants out of Port Haven. She’s more mature than we think, even if she’s not stable yet.”

“In Baltimore?” Will asked.

Alana nodded. “She’d still be an external patient at Port Haven. Technically, you’d both remain her guardians,” she added, her eyes going from Hannibal to Will and back.

“Did you talk to her about it?” Will prompted.

“I wanted to know your mind first.”

Hannibal exhaled slowly. “It’s an excellent idea. She’ll need the proper support.”

“To make sure she isn’t influenced by the wrong kind of people,” Will went on, gazing at the burning candles and the pools of wax forming in the glasses that held them.

 

December 27

 

It was over midnight when the cab arrived to pick up Alana. Abigail had already gone to bed, sleepily, her smile growing from relaxed to childish at times. Hannibal piled the dishes on the dining room table. In the living room, he saw Alana hug Will. She told him something he could not hear and he nodded, smiling, both of them a little obscured in the distance. Alana’s fingers lingered on Will’s elbow, holding, and if Hannibal had not been in the next room, she may have kissed him. But Will’s hands went to his side and he pulled away in one swift motion. It was unclear whether he would like not to take her down with him in whatever fathoms it was he thought he was falling, or if it was clearer to be alone. Hannibal did not picture Will other than alone, surrounded by the glory of others’ deaths gathered around him by his mind.

Will stepped back and Hannibal offered to walk Alana to the cab. He carried her suitcase. When they reached the car, they stopped. “Is Mme de Marandon still with the Berlin Philarmonic?” Alana asked. The alcohol, food, company and warmth had given her skin the tone and details of infinite life, as if she would never die and exist as such forever.

He nodded courteously. “Yes, she is.”

“They’re playing in New York two days from now.”

“I’ve excused myself,” he supplied, after a moment.

“To be here with Abigail?” She placed her hand on his forearm. “There’s a reason why therapy has professional guidelines.”

He cocked his head to the side, the cold of the night biting his cheek. “You’re protective of me,” he pointed out. “Early on, I understood that I could not help Abigail, or Will, unless I was personally involved with them.”

She raised her eyebrows above closed eyes, then looked up at him, halfway between tenderness and contemplation. “If their mental balance is jeopardized, it’ll hurt you in a non professional way.”

He covered her hand on his arm with his. “You weren’t thinking ‘if’. You were thinking ‘when’. And you weren’t thinking about me.”

Alana stepped back slightly, not letting go of his arm still. “I like my relationship with you. I’d like for it to be a nice, known place.”

“It’ll stay that way,” he assured her. “Because you are the heatlthiest person I’ve ever encountered. Never doubt your own strenght.”

She frowned and pulled her hand away to push her hair back behind her ear. “I’m not,” she said. “I’ll call Abigail tomorrow.”

He opened the car door for her and she settled in, eyes locked with his as he stepped away and watched the cab drive away.

 

* * *

 

When he returned inside, he found the dogs sleeping. The dishes had been piled in the kitchen, silent, aftermaths, corpses, bloodless. Hannibal went to the only lit room in the house and found Will sitting on the ground, staring at the pictures from his current case, pinned on the opposite wall. The palor of his skin matched the one of the fields of snow outside and Hannibal observed him for a time, head tilted back, eyes bottomless, open, taking death in with all the pores of his skin. Eventually, Will noticed him.

“I don’t think he kills them at all,” Will said.

“Why would he mutilate them, then?”

Will shrugged, sipped from his bourbon glass. “Leave his mark. Rite of passage into death. Random trials. Pick your favorite,” he listed.

“There is nothing common in the markings at all?” Hannibal asked, inspecting the pictures. They were grouped in two columns. The second corpse was much more bloodied than the first. Over dinner, Will had told him that the autopsy had revealed the intestines of the second victim had been removed from the body through a single slit in the abdomen. Another form of torture, dating back to as early as the eleventh century.

“Nothing except the wrapping.”

The warmth of the house compared to the cold of winter made Hannibal feel heavy, closer to something that he did not know exactly, that shimmered near his fingertips. “Wrapping can have many meanings. One can wrap a present to offer it. Something can be wrapped up to keep it secret. We wrap newborns in blankets.”

“It’s a secret.”

“If there is a secret, then, there is something to be found within it.”

Will cocked his head to the side, closed his eyes, ran his hand over them, staggered to his feet. “That’s assuming he knows what he’s doing.”

Setting an empty glass down on Will’s desk, Hannibal reached for the bottle. His fingers brushed against Will’s when he handed it over and Hannibal felt the strange mix of hot and cold they were. “Will you join Jack in investigating tomorrow?” he asked, pouring himself a glass.

“He asked,” Will said, moving closer to the pictures, as if it would help. “Two of the suspects are in Maryland, the other two are in North Carolina.” He stepped back. “But I don’t think they’ll find him that way. The sheets are important, but not so much that we’ll catch him with them.”

Hannibal watched Will’s thoughts as if they were physically present in the room with them, weaving together inky blackness and the gold of open guts and life, unleashed in fever, roaming the space of the tiny room. “If he doesn’t kill them, bodies may be the key.” He sipped. “They’re hard to come by.”

Will placed the bottle down. For a time, they both listened to the noises of the house, almost non-existent. “How would you qualify your relationship with death?” Will asked, finally, his eyes meeting Hannibal’s, present, aware, if lost in the alcohol, the fever, the tiredness, the too many words, the truths from Abigail, the truths of everyone around him.

“You’re drunk, Will,” Hannibal said, drinking his own glass down.

Nodding thoughtfully, Will slipped his hands in his pockets. “Yes,” he said. “My point still stands.”

“A relationship with death can’t be qualified. It exists, discontent and confusing, or it doesn't,” Hannibal offered, after a short pause, during which he listened only to the beats of his own heart, hoping they matched Will’s own, since they seemed so close.

When Will turned his eyes away from him, he smirked slightly. And Hannibal could not entirely tell if he was disassociating or not, right this moment, there were so many shadows around him, bundled tight. “I should sleep,” Will said, at last.

“I agree.”

As Hannibal made his way to the stairs to go to the small room Will had offered him earlier, apologizing that it had only a sofa bed, like his own – Hannibal had assured him it was fine, and it would be, in this house that inhaled and exhaled Will around him – the other man stopped him, his voice quiet, his mind raging underneath, like the strange brittleness of air pregnant with thunder. “You never think it’s weird that we get along so well?”

Hannibal smiled. “No.”

 

* * *

 

It was much further into the night and almost morning when Hannibal placed his book back on the bedside table. He dressed and got out of his room, tempted to slip into Abigail’s room to watch her sleep and know that she would never be lost to him. But it was not a familiar house for her, her sleep was most likely light and she would wake up, possibly scared.

He went downstairs instead, walking silently to the entrance to gather his coat. Behind him, Will’s body was undistinguishable from the tangled sheets and blankets of his bed, wrapped around him like rivers. His breathing was irregular, his right hand twitching near his head on the pillow, eyelids fluttering with permanently changing visions, and Hannibal would have given many things away to know what it felt like from the inside Will Graham's head in this moment.

Pushing the front door open as gently as he could, he was about to step outside when he found that one dog stood behind him, nearly motionless. He held the door open and Winston followed him outside. Hannibal pulled his collar up against his neck and they walked the night.

 

* * *

 

Will opened his eyes not remembering having closed them. He had not really slept, perhaps more like fallen, with images coming up before his eyes as if projected from the back of his mind, erractic, more than usual. He stayed still in the coolness of the bedsheets. Swallowing around his dry mouth, he sat up in bed. The dogs raised their heads. The house was perfectly silent.

None of the images he had dreamed of featured what he knew of Abigail, yet she _was everywhere. It was not him who had jumped down that boat in a North Carolina boatyard, fallen and broken his ankle, it was her, and he was there to tend to her. It was not him who had settled into the mind of the killer who wrapped his victims in bed sheets, it was her. Or was she the killer. Or was she the sheets. It was not him who had killed Garret Jacob Hobbs in his kitchen in Minnessota, it was her pulling the trigger, ten times, and Will stood in the kitchen between the counter and the gun and it took him a moment to realize that it was him who had bullet holes in his chest. Behind Abigail, Hannibal Lecter stood,_ impassive, a soulless picture, as if Will could still not imagine what was his part in this.

And he knew that Jack was right.

His first hope was that it was the fever. His next thought was to get up, and he did, and to go and see Hannibal. He slipped on a thick shirt and went upstairs.

Passing quietly by Abigail’s door, he went to the next and knocked softly. When there was no answer, he knocked again. Then, he turned the doorknob slowly. Inside, the bed had been slept in, but had been made again. In the corner, the lamp was still turned on. On the bedside table, a  Jacques Lacan book was placed atop a closed sketchbook. Will flipped the book open, _Le moi dans la théorie de Freud_ , running his eyes over some pages. There were notes, all in French, some recent, some not. He placed it back where he had found it, careful to put it in the same position. He did not dare open the sketchbook, too personal, and he got out, the irrational feeling of abandonment swelling inside of him to fill him until he felt as big as the house. The knowledge that Jack had been right all along was like his blood was about to freeze over.

Downstairs, he returned to the living room, dressed properly, put on shoes and noticed Winston was not sleeping with the others. He slipped out the front door and sat down on the porch, both feet planted in the snow, ghastly and iridescent with the moon’s blue waves, trying to think of where Hannibal could be, trying not to feel what it had felt like when Abigail had helped her father, hoping to crush the sting of betrayal he felt, and to not let it become a sea of loss and suffering.

Soon enough, he noticed a slim, tall silhouette that came over the hill west of the house, Winston in tow. Hannibal was blacker than the night sky, the dog looking like a moving silver statue in the clear night. Will tightened his coat around himself and watched them approach, Winston happy and running. When he reached him, Hannibal sat at his side on the porch. Their breathing made puffs of mist around their mouths. Winston sat down on the ground near Will’s feet and stayed still, eyes on him.

“Jack’s right about Abigail,” was all Will could say at first.

Hannibal eyed the branches of the tree in front of them, a deeper shade of dark than the nightsky. “How do you know?”

“You could at least fake surprise.”

Turning to him, Hannibal looked not worried or angry, but curious. “How do you know?” he repeated, his voice lower.

“How aware of her participation is she?” Will replied, his gloved fists clenching and unclenching.

“It’s not clear at this point.”

“But she knows, right?” Will asked, thinking that she knew about herself, what he did not know about her, what he did not know about himself, that he could kill, that it was easy, not disgusting.

“Yes,” Hannibal admitted. “But it’s still extremely painful. These memories should not be evoked carelessly.”

Will swallowed dry. “Did she bring it up on her own?”

“I realized that it made sense, just as you did. I believe I was transparent about it and she opened up to me,” the other man said, looking down at the snow at his feet.

For a moment, both were silent. “The guilt will crush her,” Will said, at last.

“Not if we help her.”

“She’s used to violence.”

“But not to the kind of violence that others would attempt on her, nor to the kind of violence her own mind will display against itself,” Hannibal explained, with the restrained passion in his voice that Will did not know was specifically true or not. But it showed something, there was an interest there, under all of it. Then, Hannibal asked, “Can she count on you, Will?”

Head down, Will exhaled. “I’m already lying. It’s done.”

Both fell silent again and the only noise came from Winston, who pawed around in the snow.

Eventually, Will sighed. “I’d like to know the rest of what I don’t know.” He stared at Hannibal long enough to make his point. “Everything.”

“About Abigail?”

“Are there other everythings between us?”

The other man pursed his lips and squared his shoulders to push his scarf against his neck. “I plan to adopt her. In a while.”

“Alana won’t agree.”

“I’m considering ways to work around her disapproval.” Hannibal paused, closed his eyes briefly. “I’m also thinking to ask Abigail to reconsider the projet of her book with Freddie Lounds. If she’s pursuing it only for material reasons, I intend to tell her I can easily support her financially. Indefinitely.”

Will nodded, while his head buzzed with a pain deeper than one from the casual headaches. “The way you said Lecter estate, I suppose we’re talking millions?”

“My shares amount to a little under seven, yes.” Hannibal got up, twirled his feet to warm them, they were slowly freezing in his leather shoes. “If we’re going to be thorough about this, you should know that I hesitate about the adoption, because I’m afraid you’ll think I try to take her away from you.”

Huffing, Will quirked his eyebrows in agreement, the shock slowly receeding in a feeling of ambient surreality. “And she’ll feel like you’re trying to make her depend on you about the money.”

“I know. I hope that I can convince her she’s safe with us.”

“I’m not sure she'll ever be safe anymore.”

Hands deep in the pockets of his coat, Hannibal looked down at Will, sitting, eyes away, trembling slightly with the fever, shaky in all the meanings of the word. “Do you understand why I didn’t tell you?”

It took some time, but finally Will nodded once, slowly. “There are bound to be traces in the Hobbs’ house,” he said, placing the first of his two feet on the other side of the line between law enforcement and crime.

“I erased those I found.”

Will got up. “You erased those you found,” he repeated, gaze lost in the night. “Am I dreaming?”

“If so, I hope you’ll remember,” Hannibal said with a slight smile, somewhat sad.

Not knowing exactly how long he stared out at the sky above the woods in front of him, Will shook himself out of his daze when Winston’s nose touched his hand. He took his gloves off to run his fingers in the dog’s fur, scratching behind his ears. Hannibal was looking at him, waiting for him to settle into it, to understand fully, or to do something, and Will was frozen, which was already something, he thought.

Suddenly, somewhere in Will’s mind, far away, two tiny pieces came into place, clearer among the mess. “Brother or sister?” he asked Hannibal.

The other man tilted his head in a detached way that told Will his aim was right. “Pardon?”

Will licked his dry lips, closed his eyes, exhaled. “You hesitated. When you talked about the orphanage,” he explained.

Hannibal stiffened in a subtle fashion that seemed strangely ominous, because it was still embedded in softness, as if he was suddenly raw. Will observed it and in the blink of an eye, it was as if someone else entirely had come and gone in this body, leaving only a trace. “If we’re friends, I’ll ask you not to push it,” Hannibal worded carefully.

Maybe the knot in Will’s stomach was from the alcohol he was still digesting, maybe not. He smiled weakly, perplexed. “We’re beyond friendship,” he said. “We’re accomplices.”

Nodding curtly, Hannibal opened the door and went back inside. Will followed.

Will was hanging his coat when Abigail’s voice came from the kitchen. She had a wool shirt and her pajama pants on and held a glass of water. “I… I woke up and I couldn’t find either of you,” she said. “I just wanted some water.”

And Will’s smile came without effort. Even if he felt broken inside, the pieces managed to put themselves together in something painful that ressembled love. “It’s fine, we were right outside,” he said. And all the deaths did not matter anymore. And the strange peace that gripped him felt physiological, as if it grew in his veins, pulsed in his heart, beating its way into his brain.

Beside him, Hannibal smoothened his gloves and placed them meticulously over each other on the table. “We both drank too much, Abigail. That’s all.”

“Mom and dad would always go and sit on the porch to talk about me, or to argue, so I wouldn’t hear.”

Will’s smile softened. “We weren’t talking about you,” he lied, telling himself it was only half a lie, because they were talking about her crimes, not about her.

“And we weren’t arguing,” Hannibal went on. “Try to go back to sleep. Come morning, I’ll get you a present. I can’t let Dr Bloom take care of all the gifts, can I?”

 


	3. 3.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I glanced at the last chapter from The Lightest Way yesterday morning and I found a _ _ glaring _ _ gallicism looking at me. And I uber-panicked, because of course I did, because hey, and I figured I would just re-edit everything forever. And of course I found thousands of things wrong and ugly with this chapter and I couldn't post it. So tonight, I decided for a different approach and I did the adult thing: I drank wine. Now everything is fine, sad and peaceful. 
> 
> And [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsfe1xsmLMg) song is the saddest holiday song ever.

_Abigail was still standing on the porch, tall and thin, her eyes smiling their worried sadness, her frail hands covered in blood, still, in Will’s mind, and everywhere else she was shaded in his love. She smiled a bright smile, an apology, not devoid of pride too, and took his hand, holding it carefully. “I thought you thought you reminded me of my father.”_

_“I do, even in my own eyes,” he replied, standing outside in a white t-shirt like the pale snow, freezing._

_“Now, I’m just worried I’ll remind you of him,” she went on, her smile fading as blood swelled up in her mouth. She held the knife to her own throat._

_He rushed forward to hold her hand back and he fumbled for something in empty cold air._

 

* * *

 

In the morning, Abigail found Will and Hannibal in the room downstairs. This door had been closed during the previous evening, the dogs were still sleeping in the living room and everything was quiet except for their voices. It had stopped snowing outside, the fields were bright with the light mirrored in the patches of ice. The air smelled of hot chocolate.

“Hello, Abigail,” Hannibal greeted her.

“Hey,” Will said. She smiled, looked inside and noticed the wall, covered in pictures. At first, she could not make out anything else than blood and wounds, some body parts, a hand, twisted, and cold colors, metal and blue and white, like stains or spots. Almost no faces, she thought, until she found them and suddenly all of their closed eyes, white cheeks and thin lips seemed to be searching for her. “It’s better you don’t look at those.”

“It’s fine,” she insisted. She could only see hazy shapes now, most of them red. Behind Will, Hannibal watched her intently. “That’s your case?” she asked, finally adverting her eyes.

“Yes.”

“It has just been covered by Freddie Lounds in Tattlecrime,” Hannibal said.

“Yes,” Will echoed, somber.

“What does that mean?” Abigail asked.

Will crossed his arms and tilted his head down, eyeing the pictures above the rim of his glasses. He was pallid, but maybe Abigail had not noticed yesterday. “She pays off police officers, or FBI staff, and she talks about the crimes in grandiose terms. She gives them catchy names. Makes poor profiles. Takes gory pictures.”

Abigail arched an eyebrow, drew her chin back. “To scare people?”

“People like to be scared, as long as the source of their fear remains virtual,” Hannibal answered.

“But she’s mocking this one. She’s definitely not glorifying him.”

“Why?” Abigail asked. “Is that bad?”

“There’s no good way to talk about it,” Will said, with a quieter shrug.

Hannibal crossed his hands behind his back. “For instance, Ms Lounds called this new killer Grandma Mummy, because he appears to mummify his victims using bed sheets appropriate for grandmothers.”

“And he just mummified the first one,” Will pointed out.

Abigail’s mouth twisted. “Like, taking the brain through the nose and all…”

“The viscera, actually. Through an incision in the abdomen. Then embalming was performed.” Will took off his glasses. “And seriously, it’s going to ruin your appetite, Abigail.”

 

* * *

 

While Abigail got back to her room to dress before breakfast, Will followed Hannibal in the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water. The warm, nourishing light of the outside flowed inside through the window and he was a stranger in his own house. He felt no threat from the slow, ponderous orbits of Abigail Hobbs and Hannibal Lecter around him. Was Will the sun, or the empty blackness of space? Did he draw them through natural force, or did he allow them to glide in his emptiness? “I don’t remember waking up,” he said, in a hushed voice. And the emptiness closed in on him. Maybe he was the sun then, only he was dead, grey, all the light aged out of him.

Coffee trickled down in a pot. Hannibal eyed him, briefly concerned, then his face went back to blankness. “What’s the first thing you remember?” he asked.

“Talking with you. About the blood. Was the blood important.”

Hannibal looked at his watch. “You missed about 35 minutes.”

Will shut his eyes, keep the light out, keep the light off, and a smile came out of him, broken. “Yeah.” He sighed. “Does it show, when I go?”

Hannibal’s features wore a mix of calm and clinical interest. Yet they blended together to form something that seemed to reach deeper in the gut. “You mentioned you were suddenly tired, your legs shifting under you like the ground was gone. Then, when I asked, you said you were alright, but you seemed distracted, if not entirely absent,” he told, softly.

“Did I still talk?”

A short moment of a smile, then it left Hannibal’s lips and remained in his cheeks. “You appeared normal. We talked. All of it was clear, intelligible.”

“So, there is no difference at all?”

“To a trained eye, you seemed absorbed, or intensely concentrated on something that eluded you. Something inside that your eyes could not see.”

Will set his empty glass back on the counter. “You consider yourself trained in me?”

“I was not implying you were a subject to scrutinize.”

More light came from the window, maybe a cloud had shifted and unveiled more sun. The snow was blinding. Will let his head back against the cupboards. “Maybe I should be, at this point.”

The coffeemaker had stopped a few minutes ago and Hannibal took two cups out. “I suppose it will look like I seek to further my point, if I point out that these moments of disassociation occur, to my knowledge, only when you empathize with a crime.”

Will paused. “You really don’t care if people die? Like literally not?” he said, then.

In the motions to pour coffee, Hannibal stilled briefly, a moment of void showing in his eyes. “I believe that you cannot save all of them, Will. Your capacities are finite,” he said. Hot coffee filled the cups and the mist of its warmth danced in the air, lacing in Hannibal’s fingers.

Taking the offered cup, Will drew his left arm around himself. He was uncertain if he felt so cold because of the slippery matter his mind had attempted to drown him into, just now, just in last night’s dream, casually, come with me in the water, Will. “My belief in saving lives of potential victims is identical to your belief in helping my mind control itself. We’re both going to keep doing it and it’s going to keep not working.”

Hannibal sipped his coffee. “Your mind cannot possibly provide as much variety as will all possible future killers. My task seems simpler.”

“Your fail will be harder on the ego.”

A tilt in Hannibal’s head. The sunlight caught in his hair and in the white collar of his shirt. “I will have failed only when you will have admitted that you cannot know yourself,” Hannibal said, eyes to the window, although Will felt the weight of his attention. “Do you think I would let you be, then, alone with your ghosts?”

Will considered it for a moment and he was not sure if lies or truths applied, because this path of thought seemed so unreal. “You should,” he whispered. “If it gets there. If I do get crazy, like locked-up crazy, don’t just stay by me out of guilt.” The coldness was so unusually inward that it did not even reach his extremities, which only felt numb, as if very far away. Hannibal grew more distant for a moment. “You and death came into my life at the same time,” Will added.

“Death does not have to bring pain. Abigail has been through many deaths and many pain. She will leave the pain behind, but keep the deaths. They are hers, Will.”

“Just as the dead in my mind are mine?”

“Just as death is something that you should learn to see in yourself, not to be caught in others’ vision of,” Hannibal said. “Do you want to see Abigail imprisoned?” he changed subject.

“No.”

“Then go from there.”

“How can you do this?” Will asked, wincing.

“We’re different. I watch people build walls in their life, boundaries and limits. You work to enforce these frontiers. I just observe. It’s made me more adaptable than you.”

“We’re not that different,” Will insisted. “I’d have done the same.” His eyes took in the rays of sun pouring into the room and in a flash everything was white and dead, and _if he gazed down at his feet, he would see them wrapped up in sheets, bled dry_. “I don’t feel so good.”

Fixingly, Hannibal looked at him. And Will felt like a cluster of physical symptoms and it was nice to be expunged from his mind for a while and rooted down in his flesh. “Stick out your tongue,” Hannibal asked.

Will did so, then closed his mouth, frowned, exhaled. “How is it?”

“Shows dehydration. Not surprising since you’ve been drinking.”

The sun was overwhelming at this point. “Festivities were probably not a good idea.”

“Not my meaning at all. Look at me,” Hannibal asked, his eyes not really intending to stare into Will’s. He spread his inferior eyelids down with his thumbs and examined the veins there.

Will looked away, at the ceiling, at the window, anywhere, and he knew he seemed panicked. He tried to mask it under thinking. “There’s nothing physically wrong,” he whispered.

Hannibal brought his hands up to the sides of Will’s neck, spreading them out in good faith, before he touched his fingertips to the undersides of Will’s jaw to feel the glands. “Does it hurt?”

“A bit, yeah.” Will swallowed and felt Hannibal’s skin against the movements of the muscles around his oesophagus, letting things in, letting things out, keeping things out, please keep everything out. “Are they swollen?”

“Slightly.”

“It can mean anything,” Will sighed. “Either something benign, or something very serious.”

Hannibal’s eyes were not on his neck anymore, but unfocused somewhere over his shoulder as his fingers delineated the minute swelling against Will’s jawbone. “Which one would have your preference?”

Will licked his lips. “Serious.”

“Do you dislike the work you do enough to wish to die to escape it?” Hannibal’s eyes came back to him now. More sun, it seemed, yet more white and blindness in the room. There was a spot of sunlight on the floor, it warmed Will’s feet.

“It’s just a common image in my mind. It would be fitting.”

“Your own suffering doesn’t scare you?”

Will made eye contact. “I’d rather take the suffering myself than find myself wrapped in the one of others. Contrarily to popular belief, it’s easier to live than to watch.”

“This hardship may have crafted you, then.”

“Would you prefer it was serious?”

Hannibal shook his head slowly.

Then something changed. At first, Will could not say precisely if it was in the pressure of Hannibal’s fingers on his skin, or in the arch of his arms. Suddenly the hands were not feeling clinically, they were touching, like a voice in the darkness, calling out from afar. And _Will stood outside his illuminated house and reveled in the peace that came with the quiet pale light inside it, as if it was beautiful and protected and kept for him and from him at the same time. Always outside looking in. But there was someone inside the house now, calling out for him, reminding him to come back, it was going cold outside, and soon the monsters and the hunters and the beasts would come out and feast on him. It was Hannibal Lecter telling him to return home._

Eyes blinking slowly, Hannibal seemed to see something new, in honest astonishment, a wave of mild shock mingling with curiosity. Like _opening a door to a room you think is the one with your past in it, and finding the present, thick, demanding, vast_.

Hannibal’s mouth drew in a thin line, surprise still somewhere around his eyes. His thoughts showed in his motions agains as he closed his hands into loose fists and started dropping them from Will’s throat, beginning to step back.

Will caught the other man’s wrists in his hands and drew them against his chest, not knowing what he planned to do after that.

They stayed like that, halted and silent, eyes down on their holding hands, until Will’s fingers softened around Hannibal’s wrists slightly. It was as if they were flying and knew they were ascending together, sucked upward to the sun, tangled in a shared panic and excitement that acted as a bond. “Don’t-…” Will started.

“Everything appears to be fine with you,” Hannibal said, in a voice Will had not heard yet. Fascination maybe, as if everything was changed.

Their hands let go, with a smooth sliding of skin and soft and heat as they disentangled.

By the time Will took his head back up, he found Hannibal heating cocoa for Abigail on the stove.

 

* * *

 

“How do you know it’s the same killer?” Abigail asked.

Will looked up from the toasts of bread in his plate, thoughts merging, going from changes to changes. “Same process. Corporal wounds inflicted post-mortem. Wrapped in bed sheets. Hidden in a location symbolic of pollution,” he explained. He had not been on the second crime scene. But Beverly had taken good pictures. The body was buried in the slime of a stream near a plant that manufactured plastic products. There were columns of mist rising from the still waters even in the winter. Chemicals were dumped in it, causing occasional reactions and elevated the water’s temperature. Deep down, the second body, hidden with its torture markings, had been wrapped in bed sheets, then in plastic, to shield it from the water. _Will could see it, glistening in the bed of the river_.

“Corporal wounds proper to ancient practices,” Hannibal noted, eyes away beyond his own plate. Will found his eyes drawn to the other man’s hands, the thought of what had happened earlier bulky in his mind, dragging it all deeper and further inside.

“So the killer is an historian, or works in a museum?” Abigail said.

Will arched an eyebrow. Earlier, he would not have been able to tell if Abigail’s interest in the case was motivated by the need to avoid her own issues, or by the desire to rationalize them, spread death out around her and flatten it into facts and datas and strangers, maybe to get a better view. Now, he knew there was a personal familiarity, the kind of grave truth that surfaced when death was not a generality. “Currently, the profile is fuzzy. The bed sheets are low-quality, they connote a lower social class. But the wounds are precise and the anatomical knowledge is exact.”

“The historical sources are also difficult to come by. Embalming or torture are not often depicted with instructions,” Hannibal added.

“Embalming, you’ll find in archeological documents. But for torture, you’ll need sketches from medieval anatomical or legal treaties. Bernard Gui or Nicholas Eymerich.”

Abigail sat back and turned her head to the window. Will wondered if she thought of the way her father cut his victims open, if it was surgical or not, if it seemed obscene to think back to her dad like she had not known him, like she had not shared it at all. “In ninth grade, there was a guy in my class who used to read these books with pictures of torture instruments in them,” she said, at last. “Teachers found him weird.”

Hannibal twined his fingers together and turned to Will. “Historical sketches would be reproduced in such volumes.”

“And they are easy to access,” Will agreed. “Common. Popular history. They wouldn’t attract a lot of attention.”

“Same paradigm as the bed sheets. Same demographics.”

“And hard to track down,” Will went on. But he knew that it fit. The picture grew clearer in his mind. The bed sheets with flowers, the tiny blue and the pale green and the white, pure and lively and spring. The cheap image of perfection that concealed the daily fights and atrocities. _The abused bodies kept under the bed. And the wary search for a way out, nothing wrong with wanting to read, looking at images of pain, seeking to express one’s own. Pain that wass as far away from him as possible. In the distance of history, it becomes almost unseen. A tiny drop of blood. Such an insignificant life after all._

Will focused again. Hannibal and Abigail were talking about fascinations for death and wounds, how little it told about a person, that this interest alone was not sufficient to deduce anything. Outside, the sun was high, the snow was melding down on the trees and falling in drops from the branches to the ground.

 

* * *

 

Above their head, they heard the floorboards of the second floor creak as Abigail paced her room, talking with Alana on the phone. The dogs had grown restless during breakfast. Will had let them out and was trying to keep an eye on them from inside. He should go and walk them, but he had managed to order his mind into a question and now it seemed strange not to ask. “What has your interest for me changed into?” he asked Hannibal.

The other man put his notebook down on the table, crossed his legs, somewhat distant, but Will preferred not to stand too close either, not until he knew for certain. “What I see is different,” Hannibal answered.

“What do you see now?”

“Someone who can look right through me, as if I was made of glass.”

“I can’t,” Will said softly, taking his eyes down.

Hannibal got up. “I disagree,” he replied, tilting his head to the side, as if it helped him look. He ran his knuckle on the edge of the table, not as distracted as he made it look. “What did you see, Will?”

Will leaned into the doorway, feelings rushing to his head, waiting to be put into words. It could not be life and happiness that slept in this man, _down where no one would see, among the physiological mysteries of the body. Anatomy had long been considered an enigma of its own, it was a profanity of its own to witness the mechanism thought and implemented by God, like spying on what was not yours. But for whom was this that lived inside Hannibal Lecter? And somewhere within Will, something said that it was for him, and him alone, and_ it was like stupor mixed with heat in his cheeks. “Something strong, bright, fierce. Something that could be dangerous.” He looked away when he realized he had been looking, but he had not seen how Hannibal looked at him, they just stared into each other, unaware and absorbed. “You don’t want to know how this makes me feel?”

“It seems too formal a question at the moment,” Hannibal said, smiling slightly.

Slowly the daze turned to fear in Will. He was not sure if this was his house, if they were really here, if he had not made it up entirely, and for a moment, he wanted to reach out and touch Hannibal, make sure he was there, and not just the twisted image that his mind conveyed in its search for itself. It lasted long enough that Will was certain he held his hand out. But no, it stayed at his side, rigid and calm. “I wish I could know what’s in my head and what’s not,” he whispered.

Moving forward, Hannibal laid his hand on the table beside Will’s. They stared at their fingers, separate, fanned out, until Hannibal covered Will’s index and thumb with his little and ring finger, clasping them once, feeling the fever right under the skin, before letting go. “None of this in your head, Will.”

Will shook his head, his eyes attached to his hand where Hannibal’s fingers had been. “My head isn’t a nice place. You don’t want to be there.”

“On the contrary,” Hannibal said, observing the side of Will’s face, where the temple met the cheek, the quickest way to the brain inside. “What I want is now very clear.”

Stepping back, Will hoped that he would remember this moment. He felt like his life was not were he had left it, now it was inside of this man, and he should go get it, see for himself, and it felt warmer, tidier there. Outside, the sun was so strangely blazing, Will thought he would walk into fire the second he would set foot on the porch. “I need to walk the dogs. Think. Clear my head.”

Hannibal nodded. The mixture of emotions in the expression on his face was so compact, Will could not tell exactly which was which. There was probably everything, and Hannibal seemed tense trying to keep them all underneath. “I will inform Jack Crawford I can no longer report to him about you,” he noted, as Will put on his coat.

“He’ll ask Alana.”

“She’ll say no.”

Will looked away, both persistent and eluding. “He’ll ask you why.”

Hannibal went to get his coat, let it hang on his arm, caressed the cashmere and wool. “I’ll say I no longer feel comfortable supporting the FBI’s use of your talent,” he said, arranging his scarf around his neck. “It is the truth.” He tied his shoes while Will put on his boots. “Is your piano tuned?”

Will blinked. “What happened with Tobias Budge reminded me to have it done.”

With a single curt nod, Hannibal said, “I’ll go in Baltimore to get a present for Abigail.” He gazed down at his hands while he slipped on his gloves, letting him the chance to watch, Will realized, if he wanted to. “Do you prefer I leave after?” Hannibal asked, polite, with a note of coolness to his voice.

“No,” Will said. “No. She likes it. You here.” Upstairs, he could still hear Abigail’s voice in the distance. He would stay close to the house, not go far, so she would not search for him once she was done. “There’s another reason why you hesitated to bring up adoption. It implies something about us, right?” he remarked.

The other man exhaled and came closer. Will did not back away. “The bridges built by the mind are treacherous,” Hannibal said, in a low voice.

He turned on his heels and walked out. Will stared at him from the window in the door, followed him with his eyes as he got into his car and then until the car was gone. Then he got out too and joined his dogs.

 

* * *

 

Will did not go very far off into the field with the dogs. Abigail watched him walk with the pack dispersing, then gathering around him again. He was more or less going in circles around the house. When he was at the farthest, she went silently down the stairs and into the small office.

The door creaked open and the pictures were just as they had been earlier. Only now, she could look at them with nobody watching her. She felt no disgust at first, a minor fright, maybe, as her imagination functioned and brought her into the pictures. Would her father have done that? She probably should not be wondering about it.

She stayed there until she heard Will come back, the dogs’ nails on the porch outside, some of them barking; only then, did she close the door, go back to her room. She had thought of removing a picture, one of the first victim’s hand, with the stitches in it, and bring it back to her room, to keep it in her book, but Will would have noticed.

 

* * *

 

The bed sheets had proven difficult to trace. It was a generic pattern, sold in many places. The sole monitored source of customers was online sales. They had managed to have two other agents to assist them with the two suspects in Baltimore, but they had handed over the North Carolina ones to the local police.

In a corner of the lab, Price was putting paper clips together to form a chain. Zeller folded a piece of paper over itself again and again, until he could not crease it anymore, then started with another. Katz sat in front of the computer, staring at the clock until the test was over. “Lounds thinks it’s a girl,” Zeller said.

Her eyes did not let go of the clock, except to go to the beaker where the skin from the second victim’s toe floated in the acid solution. “Because bed sheets are domestic and women are associated with the household,” she replied, monotonous.

“Old guys don’t make their own beds, they don’t buy sheets,” Zeller countered, laying his garland down on the desk and drawing a spiral pattern with it.

Price threw a tiny folded paper ball at him. “They do if they’re alone,” he said. “How much longer?” he asked Beverly.

“Most of the time, they’re not. Men have a shorter life expectancy,” Zeller retorted.

Beverly turned to them, hands slipping peacefully into the pockets of her lab coat. “Women can kill too. It’s not inherently male,” she replied. “One minute.”

“You still think it’s weird Lounds called him ‘Grandma’,” Zeller said, adjusting two rogue paper clips into place.

“I think it’s irrelevant what she thinks. Being accurate is not her point.”

Price nodded in the direction of the blinking light on the computer screen. “It’s ready.”

Sliding down from the stool, Beverly sampled the liquid. The small piece of skin had sunk to the bottom of the glass beaker, it was puffy and pink, almost whitened.

“So, what is it?”

She turned to her colleagues, her brow taut, her mouth contorting. “Ink.”

“Like tatoo ink?” Price asked, face wrung around a puzzled frown.

“Who gets a tatoo on their toe?” Beverly asked.

Price arched his eyebrows in perplexity, moving to place the skin piece on a slide to archive, bring the beaker to the washing station. Beverly pulled up the report on the second victim, looking for any mention of tatoos, injuries or body art. “Most serial killers are men. Most like 90%,” Zeller pointed out.

She did not look up, and grabbed the report on the first victim. “More like 87%. And women killers with many victims tend to target their family members and loved ones, so they’re never considered serial killers, even if they are.”

“And there remains the question that really matters,” Price said, slipping rubber gloves on. “Who gets a tatoo on their toe?”

 

* * *

 

For a moment, Will considered the question. “Any insights?” Beverly’s voice on the phone prompted him.

The words twirled in Will’s mind. He tilted his head back, took his glasses off, Winston placed his head on his thigh as Will leaned back into his seat. “It may have been placed once he was already…” he started. _The cold toe was rigid, almost blue on the grey metalic table, severed from the body and it seemed to_ look at him. And it was clear. “Some morgues tatoo the bodies to identify them. In this case on the toe. Can you make out what’s on it?”

“Decomposition was too advanced,” Beverly exhaled. “It seemed like a dot.”

“Okay,” Will said. “You’re still investigating the four suspects today?”

“You’re not coming with?”

“No. Can you keep me updated?” he asked.

She paused. “You don’t think it’ll get us anywhere?”

Will looked at his feet, the floor beside them, then the window. “Could, could not. We’ll need to cross-reference it with something else.”

“You have something in mind…” she suggested.

“Documentation about ancient and medieval corporal wounds.”

“And access to it,” she agreed. “Like historical material, exhibits and stuff?”

He shook his head. “Specialized documentation would attract attention. We’re looking for an amateur who considers himself specialized.”

“So unspecialized documentation,” she mused. “Like what? _The Big Book of Pain_?”

He closed his eyes, nodded, scowled at the title. “Exactly.”

“I’ll run a search in public libraries’ records and online sales’ algorithms.”

_Garret Jacob Hobbs stared at him from the corner of the room. The furniture around Will was gone, Winston had disappeared, he no longer held the phone in his hand. Hobbs would not let go of his eyes. In the other corner, Abigail called out to him. “Is there a place for death in your head?” She looked down at her feet, where the blood pooled, almost black in the winter day’s half-light. “Am I into this place or somewhere else?”_

_He tried to smile, but his face and head were motionless, as if he wore it as a disguise. “You’re with me. That’s enough,” he said._

_“I’m not good for you,” she whispered, her hand over the cut in her neck._

_“You’re the only thing sane in my life, Abigail,” he maintained, and he started trembling, and he thought he would shatter and fall, but it was Garret Jacob Hobbs who exploded in tiny shreds of life and decayed skin. Will did not turn toward him, Abigail kept smiling at him. Outside, he heard the stag’s loud breath, but he could not see it._

“Will?” Beverly was asking, on the phone.

“Yes, I’m here. Sorry,” he said, feeling the sweat on his brow with his fingers. He wondered why death was pictured as cold. Right now, it felt warm and burning and sordid, like the jungle of things stranded.

 

* * *

 

Mr D’Evangelis’ heart had proved to be holding a small tumor in a ventricle. After removing the cancerous tissue and the calcification around it, Hannibal had no choice but to chop the meat and reserve it for stuffing. Then, before draining the body from its blood, he had removed the fat in the abdomen and thighs. He had melted it in a pan and it had solidified in a glass jar in his refrigerator, yellowish white, contrasting with the white eggs beside it. He stared at it thoughtfully for a moment, then moved to the freezer and took out three lamb shanks.

In his bedroom, he stopped in front of a small bookshelf and took out the worn copy of Giacomo Leopardi’s _Idilli_. His fingers brushed over the cover and he placed it back down, face up on the shelf. He remembered the first occasion when he had met Will Graham, the light cringing under the layers and layers of darkness, the steady walls, so high, his own seemed pale and vain, and the realization that Will did not know what these walls guarded had crept in, like water infiltrating stone and pushing. Now, Will could not keep him out, he simply did not know that he was already inside. Hannibal paused, looked at the book again and went to place his clothes in the wash.

In the kitchen, he took carrots, turnips and parsnips from the refrigerator. As he washed them, Leopardi’s book came back to him and his thoughts went inward for a time. He was glad his mind was not the only thing around him at the moment, for it threatened to take him down, and he focused on the vegetables, the peels under his fingers, their coolness, the dust on the carrots’ dying leaves. He set the oven’s temperature and thought of Abigail, wondering if one day, she would have entirely absorbed Mischa’s image, or if she would refuse and remain herself. What would he do then? At the same time, he knew and did not know.

Once the _confit_ was cooking, Hannibal went back to his bedroom, selected new clothes and put them on the bed to pack. As he folded them and stacked them in his bag, he turned to the bookshelf again. Maybe to open his own insides was the only way to access Will’s. He had never wished to open them up. And so, in a way, he supposed, he ignored just as much of his own mind as Will did. And it seemed safe. Inside Will, it would be protected, known, taken care of.

He went back to his bag.

It was dark already, once the lamb was ready and packed in glass containers with the roasted vegetables and potatoes, when he took Abigail’s gift down to wrap it. He chose paper with small flowers and twisted vines, blue, purple and green, on a white and yellow background.

In the car, he paused and closed his eyes briefly. Now, the thought of placing his own darkness deep inside the light of Will’s mind was firmly set and he could not escape it. He still felt the warmth of his hand under his own and he speculated at the texture of his chest, his neck, his arms, his thighs.

He got out of the car, went back to his bedroom and took the book from his bookshelf. It was small, an old edition, the pages thinned with time, and it fit tightly in the pocket inside his coat, close to the chest. As he went down the stairs, he was convinced it was the book beating and not his heart, and soon every organ in his chest was thumping, same rhythm, same pace, force and strenght and measure and secret. It was not a melody, it was just a rhythm, simple, primordial, unstructured, taking him forward.

As he drove, his decision shifted around in his mind. Will had already seen farther in him than he had expected. Seeking yet more closeness, Hannibal would see more, but be discovered just as much. It should have been unnerving. But it was air after years, decades, centuries spent under muddied waters. And Will’s love for Abigail had not faltered. And he had death in him as well. Or would it be light.

 

* * *

 

Abigail had read all afternoon, then she had watched the sun set over the fields. It had gone done behind the woods and, for a moment, the highest branches of the tallest trees had been red, the flames reaching the stars as they had begun to peek through the fading colors of day. She opened her present after dinner, in Will’s living room. It was an old copy of Bach’s _Well-Tempered Clavier_ , Hannibal told her. “I believe that learning music could help you focus. It is a somewhat less private hobby then reading.”

She considered the piano. “You’ll teach me?”

He nodded. “Like I learned.”

Abigail examined the thick gothic prints on the score. She made out the first word (‘Das’), but the rest looked like an elaborate filigree of black on grey. “It’s your copy,” she said, testing the ground, looking at Hannibal’s face for a trace of motive.

“I know all pieces by heart, now,” he said, with a smile. Then, he held his hand out, palm up. She looked up and she saw only love in his eyes, it was comforting, and welcoming, and something else that made her want to scream as loud as she could, but she did not and the weight of the cry settled on her stomach as she smiled back. She took his hand and went to sit at the piano with him.

 

* * *

 

From the outside, most of the house was dark. All the windows from the second floor rooms were not lit up, the light in the kitchen was dim. But in the living room, it was bright, a pastel golden. Through the windows on the porch, he stared at Hannibal Lecter and Abigail Hobbs sitting together, their backs to him, hands on the keys.

When he walked inside, hushing the dogs as they rushed in, Hannibal turned his head slightly his way, but Abigail was concentrated, eyes attached to her fingers spread out on a major scale. Will stared at Hannibal, somewhere just below the eyes.

“Your fingers are longer than mine,” Abigail noted, frowning.

“But yours are more graceful,” Hannibal replied.

The young woman placed her fingers on the keys again and pressed them in order, slower than Hannibal would. The dogs settled in the living room, curious, some swinging their tails, exited at the sound. Will towelled the snow the dogs’ paws had brought in, then checked his phone, waiting for an update.

“Do you feel well here, Abigail?” Hannibal asked, head down, watching her fingers.

“It’s better than the clinic,” she said, quietly.

The other man replicated the major scale on the left part of the keyboard, singlehandedly. “Dr Bloom thinks it would be better if you lived alone, once you leave the clinic.”

Abigail dropped her hands in her lap and looked around her. Her gaze stopped on the dogs, than on Will. “How would that happen?” she said.

“There are special appartments designed for people who stayed in psychiatric facilities for a while,” Will explained, observing Rockie who chewed on her latest purple plush toy.

“With other... patients?” Abigail asked.

“No. You’d be alone. You could go out, come back whenever you’d want. Have a job,” Will went on.

Abigail slid out of the piano bench and got up, arms crossed on her chest. “Dr Bloom doesn’t want me staying with one of you,” she understood, eyes going from Will to Hannibal and back.

Interrupting the fugue he had started playing, Hannibal turned around. “She’d disagree,” he conceded.

“Why?” Abigail said, uneasy, her whole body fraught. Will was certain that she knew why and only wanted to hear the words from them.

“Because she thinks it wouldn’t be good for you,” Will said.

“'Nor for us,” Hannibal added.

“You don’t want me to go,” she whispered.

“No,” Will stepped in. “We want you to do whatever you want.”

Hannibal smoothed the sleeve of the dark sweater he wore, plucking a dog hair from it. “We also want to protect you from the people who might try and influence you while you are vulnerable.”

Her voice became fierce. “I killed someone. I'm not vulnerable.'

Two dogs lifted their heads from their sleeping pads. There was a moment of silence and calm, eerie and lenghtening, during which they could all hear the wind whistle in the chimney, through its uneven rocks and in the hole in the front.

“One doesn’t entail the other, Abigail,” Will reminded her, gently.

“I think Dr Bloom thinks you want to be fathers to me. That’s what would be bad, right?”

Hannibal rose smoothly, something monumental in his serenity. “We don’t intend to replace your father.”

“Because you’re not trying to kill me,” she said. Her eyes were steady and strong and clear, but her voice was breaking up, yet she stood, waiting for the waves of water, tears, pain, blood that were coming.

“Because we were there when you lost that part of you. Maybe we hold some of it,” Will said.

Abigail brushed her hair back behind her ears. “What if I don’t want it back?”

The dogs had settled back to sleep peacefully, and Hannibal’s smile was warm. “Then it’ll stay with us.”

Sitting down, Abigail turned away from them, hidden in the faint darkness of the room. Will looked at his feet and waited and Hannibal went in the kitchen to make tea. After a time, Abigail wiped the tears with her fingers and got up, went back to the piano bench and sat down. She started playing the scale again, frowning both at her fingers and at the score. Will sat at her side and played it with her. She kept her eyes on his fingers.

She noticed he was not looking at the score at all, instead focusing on a point just above the keys. “You don’t read scores?”

There was a trace of shyness in his smile, but it seemed content too. “I just never learned,” he said, as his fingers reproduced the part of the fugue Hannibal had played moments earlier.

Hannibal returned with tea. “You have quite an ear.” He placed their cups on the piano. “I played it only once.”

Will looked at the mug on the piano, then brought his eyes to Hannibal’s, but let go of them when he began to smile and brought his head back to the keys, focusing on the rim of his glasses, and he missed the foreign, watchful look on Hannibal’s face that led to something softer.

 

* * *

 

They rang the doorbell past eight o’clock. She was sitting at her sewing machine and peered through the blinds before opening the door.

“Agent Zeller,” one said.

“Agent Price,” the other said. “We’re with the FBI.”

They asked if they could come in and she let them. They went in the kitchen to ask their questions.

“I’m a suspect because of what I purchase online?” she asked, placidly.

Agent Zeller looked at the sewing machine in a corner of the living room. It sat under a single, intense, white lamp. The colors were colder under its beam, but she knew it was truer. Everytime she looked up from the cloth she was sewing, she found the world at the same time pale and dull and darkened. “You bought 34 different set of sheets with the same pattern in the past 12 weeks. And,” he gestured at the surroundings, “you don’t own a hotel.”

Contador sat on the kitchen counter, cleaning the top of his head with his front paw, patient, dedicated, but ears drawn and eyes nervous. Armstrong was out of sight already. “If you’ll come downstairs with me, I’ll show you how I use them.”

“Basement?” Agent Price asked.

She nodded. They seemed polite about it, but she had no choice but to go down the stairs first, both of them behind her. She turned on the lights and the two cats watched them from the top of the stairs.

Her work was placed behind a curtain. They approached and their eyes widened when she pulled the string. The tiny flowers in the sheets had been cut out, some she had soaked into a papier-mâché solution, others had been solidified with silicone, others were plastified, and others were still fleecy. All were placed on a large surface, with bumps, to ressemble a field. A field of artificial flowers. “It’s my next piece. I’m under contract with the Pferder Gallery, right here on Dalhousie street. It should be part of next season’s exposition.”

Agent Zeller turned to Agent Price, mouth slightly gaping, and Price looked at him sternly. “Well, sorry for disturbing you, Dr Spard,” Zeller said.

“I’ve retired in 2008. It’s Mrs Spard, now,” she answered, agreable. “And don’t apologize, please. Some artists don’t like to show a work in progress, but I always appreciate a first opinion.”

Agent Zeller’s eyes had not left the piece yet. “It’s lovely,” he said curtly, while Agent Price’s eyes were fastened to his feet.

She thanked him and they apologized again on their way upstairs. As she led them out, she explained that she worked on showing how hollow our conception of nature had become, Contador rounding his back gently against her legs.

 

* * *

 

Outside, Price and Zeller walked back to the car in silence. Once they were seated, Price pulled out his phone. “It wasn’t lovely. It’s contemporary art. It can’t be lovely.”

“I didn’t hear you speak up.”

“Conceptual?” Price suggested, dialing Beverly Katz.

Zeller snorted. “That’d just be describing it.”

Katz did not pick up and he left a text message. It said, “Four out of four. Fail. Epic.”

 

* * *

 

Will’s mind could not stay off the case, so he took his laptop and settled in the armchair in his living room, browsing Amazon endlessly for books about corporal punishments that would appeal to normal people. From time to time, he heard Abigail pace upstairs. The dogs were sleeping around him, except for Buster, who had decided to sleep at the foot of the stairs in the next room. At some point, he thought he heard a loud, steady pacing on the porch outside, calm and cold. But when he got up to go to the door and look outside, there was nothing to see, no stag, no black nose in the darkness against his shoulder.

The blue glow the screen gave off made everything else darker around him. And many times, he thought he saw Hannibal Lecter, sitting in the other armchair in front of his own, or on the bed, waiting for him to talk. But he knew Hannibal was upstairs, reading or working. And it could be the fever, or his mind melting, or anything else that was wrong with him, but he did not even care. All of this seemed like a dream, and it seemed normal, because it was a dream, because there should not be anything else than a dream that he could live in. This was not his home anymore. He was only home in the bleak vision that lived outside in the fields, roaming and whispering into the night, moving with the darkness.

He thought it was only his mind again when he brought his eyes back up and Hannibal was there. He waited a minute, staring at the silouhette in the doorway. “It’s going to sound strange,” he said.

“What would?” Hannibal said, motionless. Will could not see his face.

“Are you really there, right now?”

“Even if I was a hallucination, I would say yes, wouldn’t I?” was the answer, as Hannibal moved forward until he sat down in the chair before Will.

His eyes remained on Will’s face. With only shadows to frame them, the younger man’s features were silver, white gold and ice in the spectral light from the screen, a ghost with human limbs, or something like a shard of moon, mixed with silence and wait. Silently, Hannibal held out the small book he had brought with him. Will frowned and extended a hand in the darkness out of the armchair to take it. “You read Italian?” he asked, looking at the title. Hannibal nodded calmly. “I don’t,” Will went on.

“I know,” Hannibal said. “Open it.”

The book had been read often. When Will opened it, it split open on its own, revealing a small picture, tucked in the center. The colors had faded, it was from the late sixties or early seventies. A little girl was posing, hands crossed on a table atop a lace cloth, looking away from the photographer. Maybe 5 or 6 years old. “Sister,” Will said, quietly.

“Yes.”

Closing the book softly, Will put it down on the table between them. “You didn’t have to show me this.”

“Why not? You already knew,” Hannibal answered, his eyes avoiding Will’s.

“Is this why Alana doesn’t want you to get close to Abigail?”

Hannibal shook his head. “You are the only person alive who knows this.”

“Violent death?”

“Yes,” Hannibal breathed, tension coiling inside of him, something like a mix of violence and strain, it came out like pain. “You hallucinate Garret Jacob Hobbs. I see my dead sister in Abigail,” he worded carefully.

“I have never known someone as good as I know you. Ever,” Will said, after a moment, because it seemed to make sense.

“A shared impression.”

Waiting, head tilted back in the armchair, Will let his eyes wander in the room, avoiding Hannibal to rest on the book near him. “Alana’s right about me,” he said, at last. “I am unstable.”

“Are you warning me off, Will?” Hannibal asked, with a slight smile that made his features human again, before it left.

“No. I’m warning myself,” he began. “Alana called it instability, but... it’s not only that.” He shivered and drew his arms tighter around himself. “Everyone thinks that there’s something magic inside of me, something secret, that should be uncovered. It attracts them like the brightness of the fishing lure in the water.” He paused, tried to look elsewhere, but Hannibal’s eyes would not let go of him. “But what’s inside. It’s not good. That’s the secret. There’s nothing else.”

“Are you afraid of this secret for itself? Or of the reactions of others?”

“Both,” Will said, rubbing his hands together and they were frozen, like dust.

For a minute, there was only the sound of the skin of his hands moving together. He trembled slightly. “I will never abandon you, Will,” Hannibal said, finally.

“We’ll see,” Will said, wincing as a tremor ran in his right forearm and hand.

Hannibal’s eyes followed it. Will brought his arm against himself, but another spasm came. “How long have you had those?”

“About two weeks. It’s nothing,” Will insisted.

Hannibal left the room and went upstairs. He came back a minute later and placed two pills on the table, beside the Leopardi book. “This would be a lot easier if you told me everything,” he started, reaching for a whisky glass and slowly reducing the pills to powder with its base.

Will smiled nervously. “Wouldn’t want you to think I’m crazy.” He gestured toward the pills. “What are those?”

“Your brain is exhausted,” Hannibal answered. “It needs to sleep.” He placed the powder in the glass and poured a finger of whisky over them. He had taken the strongest antibiotics there were in the small hidden compartment at the bottom of his bag. Along with the alcohol, the dosage would cause enough drowsiness for them to pass as sleeping pills.

He held his hand out and Will gave him his laptop, which Hannibal closed smoothly, handing Will the glass in exchange. “Dead rabbits and rabbit holes,” Will muttered, before he drank the alcohol down.

 


	4. 4.

December 28

 

Beating faster, Abigail watched bubbles come up as the yellow from the egg yolks faded into the white of the milk. There were shades of copper from the cinammon and specks of red from the chili pepper, peeking through the golden mix. Hannibal was right behind her, waiting for coffee to be ready, slicing bread on the counter. He had already cut thin pieces of apples and bananas, wordlessly chopped a table spoon of fresh rosemary. It grew in the pot by the window, the small window with the short beige curtain with the brown flowers and the metal frame.

Everything seemed like home, yet it was only the form of her life. She felt strong. She could lie and she could kill. There would be blood and she would get away with it.

She stirred the mixture again and checked the heat under the pan, eyed the melting butter, the tiny bubbling traces of ivory turning brown. It would be like cooking at home with her parents, if not for Hannibal’s more distant presence. He had stacked the bread slices in a plate beside the oven. Abigail placed one slice in the egg and milk mix, let the liquid soak the bread. When she placed it down in the pan, it sizzled and she watched carefully. She held the spatula in her right hand and moved her arm slightly, just thinking about it. “Not yet. Let it stick longer,” Hannibal said, behind her.

Waiting, she wondered if she would feel so at home here if not for Hannibal. Things came together around her when he was there. But he wanted it to, and she knew it. And she did not know if it was her or not, in the middle of all this. She liked the light in this kitchen, and the woods, and the fields outside. And Will Graham knew less about her and maybe she could use that. But she thought about it and she did not know how. “How much longer?” she asked.

Hannibal stepped in beside her. A few seconds passed. “Now.”

She flipped the slice and it was streaked with brown, almost crispy and still wet inside. “How do you intend to do it?” she said, firmly. The bread smelled of spice now.

“Do what, Abigail?” Hannibal asked.

“Be my father and not my father.” She waited for the nearly burnt smell to come up.

“Do you perceive me to act as both?”

“No,” she denied, first. “I don’t know what you’re trying to be. Dr Bloom told me you reacted to trauma, like I did,” she went on. “Like Will did.”

Hannibal reached beside her to get plates from the cupboard. He seemed both at ease and not in Will’s kitchen. To think about it made her feel like she was in a play, things moving around her, that she did not understand. “A traumatic event calls for a reaction. The psyche adapts and changes. I have adapted to you. You have adapted to me,” he said, setting the plates down on the table next to the kitchen island. “And here we are.”

Abigail placed the french toast slice in the empty plate on the counter, soaked another slice in the mixture, and put it in the pan as well. “Since you’re not acting as my dad, does that mean I can ask you questions that I couldn’t ask my parents?”

“You can ask all the questions you want. Only know that I will answer them.”

“Like when was the first time you were drunk?” she tried.

Hannibal took forks and knifes from a drawer and towelled one fork until the prongs were brighter. “There are other questions to ask, I’m sure,” he replied. “And Europeans commonly start drinking at a younger age.” Abigail was silent, observing the second slice sizzling in the pan, waiting. “I was ten. It was vodka.”

“So much for Europe,” Will said from the doorway to the living room. “I helped myself to my dad’s bourbon when I was eight.” He walked in the kitchen, Winston and Buster after him, his arms closed around his sweater. He seemed less pale than the previous day, but Hannibal saw the glaze in his eyes, the distinct smell of fever reached him where he stood, it was enveloping, threatening, how far could Will bring this before it broke, how far would he walk on his naked feet in the fire before it burned the flesh and forced him down.

If the antibiotics had done nothing, the encephalitis was not bacterial. Viral, maybe. If it was autoimmune, Hannibal could not treat it remotely.

Will sat down at the table and listened, both hands around his coffee cup, while Abigail asked Hannibal, “What would you do to protect me?”

Hannibal’s face went blank with earnestness, but he was looking at Will, whose attention seemed lost in something else yet. “Everything it takes.”

“Would you kill someone?” she asked, concentrating on the last slice of bread, perhaps hoping that Will would hear her, or trying to see if it would change something if he did.

Preparing the plates, Hannibal put the fruits around the toasts and arranged the chocolate syrup on them. “I wouldn’t let it come to that, Abigail.” At the table, Will’s hand jerked, its fingers clutching at the air, as if they moved over piano keys.

When Will had his plate before him, he brought his head back up toward Hannibal, then his eyes went to Abigail and he smiled at them both.

 

* * *

 

This day was much warmer. The snow had begun to melt and there was a puddle of water and thawing mud in front of the porch. The dogs hurried outside, Abigail followed them. Her bags were packed inside. She had put the gifts under the folded clothing. She liked the fur hat Dr Bloom had brought her, her father would never have given her something like that.

Once they were all outside, she had asked Will if he was alright. He was still sleeping when she had got up and he seemed better, but during breakfast his eyes seemed unable to focus on anything. But after, he had looked better.

Him and Hannibal had told her about returning to Port Haven. She had group therapy in the afternoon. Hannibal would drive her back, they would leave soon. Will had work to do at Quantico. “Are you going to catch him?” she asked, her boots picking up some mud. It was so warm she did not even need her gloves.

There was no sun though, only clouds, in which white, gray and a darker near blue amalgamated. The light came as a clear beam, filtering through the clouds without a precise shape or origin. “We have a new list of suspects, we’ll see where that leads us.” There was a large dead branch near the tall tree before the hill. Will broke a part of it and handed it to Abigail. “We’ll probably cross-check lists all day. It’s not very glamorous.” She caught the wood stick and the dogs gathered around her.

She leaned back and threw it as far as she could, it landed just over the top of the hill. “I know. Death has a kind of sad, shoddy tone to it.”

Thinking of telling her that it was not what he meant, Will opened his mouth but could not speak, because the dogs were barking and running after the stick, and Abigail was running after them. Hannibal was in step behind him, untying his scarf, letting the red wool hang around his neck. The air carried heat and it smelled of spring around them. Things were watery and _run down, and he should catch it before it caught up with the body, the decomposition had already started and the cold was not doing its work, then how should they be preserved at all, life would be coming back to get them and they should stay hidden, because they were gone for good and not coming back, and why would things not stop changing, as if the organs rotting inside of you were not enough, why could you just not leave me alone._ “How are you feeling?” Hannibal asked him.

He had felt better when he had woken up. Now he only felt like he was neither cold nor warm. In fact, he felt like his skin was entirely gone, as if there was nothing keeping him from melting right into the liquid ground. “Hazy,” he said. “Like I’m coming down with something. I don’t even know if it’s a feeling about me. It's like everything is changing.”

The other man walked at his side. Abigail was far gone in the field. It was as if she never wanted to go back to Port Haven. “Your mind frequently shifts shapes,” Hannibal observed.

Will shook his head. “It’s not like that.” Their shoes left gray hollows in the snow. “I had a certain knowledge of Abigail. That changed.”

“Has it? Is it not the circumstances surrounding her that have changed?” Hannibal held his gloves in his hands where they were clasped behind his back. He avoided a bush of brambles. It had been frozen and was now glistening in water, the torns shining in the daylight.

Eyes on the ground a few steps ahead of him, Will could still see the dancing spots of the dogs and the shape of Abigail in the distance. “I have a certain knowledge of you. Limited,” he started, his words matching his careful stride. “But I trust you. I presume you trust me. I presume you love Abigail.”

In the morning’s daylight, Hannibal’s face was a shade darker, nearly some kind of golden. It seemed healthy, like something that, if peeled, would only reveal the same surface over and over again. And Will was nothing but a maze of flaws, and a labyrinth so tightly-woven, he could not even find his own way in them. But Will knew, now, that there was something far away within Hannibal Lecter, drowsing, eyes half-open in the concealed recesses. “There are only few things about me that need be known,” Hannibal said, brushing a blond dry straw from his coat. “You know those. The rest are trivialities.”

“Like me presuming you’re single, for instance,” Will offered, frowning, hidden behind his glasses and under his wool hat, _Hannibal’s hand on his arm, his fingers on his throat, Will holding these hands and these fingers to his chest, not letting go, not wanting to let go, it was only now that he had come aware of the secret within that, really, he saw how it matched his own, like a hook digging in the flesh, when he would pull,_ like he was doing now, _how much organs and veins and blood and parts of soul would come with._ “Are you seeing anybody?”

Hannibal’s eyes searched for his and the whiteness _exuding from the clouds rang in Will’s ear like a slowly saturating sound, growing, then fading into the background of his blood thumping in his ears, his breathing_ in his throat. “I am currently seeing a flutist. We meet when she is on tour on the East coast,” Hannibal said, in a voice slightly lower than his usual. “She’s married,” he added. “You?”

Huffing, Will grinned humorlessly. “You know that about me.”

They walked in silence for a moment, then came to a stop under a short ashtree. It had been dead since last winter. Ever since, it was only losing patches after patches of its bark, revealing the bare lignin and cellulose beneath, the vascular tissue slowly running dry, life replaced by air inside. “And are we? Seeing each other, Will?”

Will paused. “Would you want that?”

Bringing his hands back before him, Hannibal folded his gloves in two and pressed on them. “Not if you don’t,” he said, moving closer. “So far things have happened spontaneously and simultaneously, but the suspicion always remains that they may have been misinterpreted.”

“Things,” Will picked up.

The other man’s arm brushed against his, through the layers of clothing and the rigid wool of the coat and the fresh air of this strange winter day. They stood side by side, eyes on Abigail. With her dark coat and her bright scarf, she stood clearly apart from the dogs around her. “That could suggest we are becoming romantically involved,” Hannibal continued.

Closing his eyes, tilting his head, Will moved away from the point where his shoulder touched Hannibal’s. “You just spelled that out.”

There was a moment before Hannibal spoke again. “Wherever this conversation may lead, I would like to benefit from the same arrangement you have with Alana Bloom.” Abigail waited for the dogs to gather again around her. Then she threw the stick. Above Will and Hannibal, the ashtree’s branches moved in the warm wind. “And remain your friend.”

“I don’t know what I feel for Alana, anymore,” Will started. Abigail should be with her, he had first thought, both of them would be safe, they were equally _kind, equally innocent, away from all this and would remain away forever. But Alana was brighter and Abigail became shadier, as if her edges were blurring out. There was so much light in Alana, it had soft fingers instead of fangs and teeth and hoofs and feathers, and she passed and she dissolved away and Will sagged, brought to his knees and further down_. “I used to know. It’s why I should probably not decide now. So many things are different. I need for them to stop changing.”

“Your feelings for Abigail are not altered by this,” Hannibal said, as if he observed, clinical, serene. “Why would those regarding me be?”

Will turned toward him, but kept his eyes on the ground on a spot before Hannibal’s feet. “Do you always hide this much?”

“What do you mean?” the other man answered calmly.

“It’s a very detached question.” Abigail saw them and started coming back their way, the dogs insisting to run through the fields, scattering, returning, scattering again.

The wind became colder quickly. Around them, the drizzle turned from liquid to solid, then back to liquid, leaving tiny dots in Will’s glasses. He was still staring ahead at Abigail, when Hannibal said, “I’d rather have your truthfulness than your kindness.” Will felt something sway, then swell within, just as if he was pushed upward, but so fast it seemed first like he was lost. But there would always be hands to catch him. “I’ve never met anyone who described their feelings and thoughts as lucidly as you do. It carries beauty. I wouldn't miss out on it.”

Will looked at him this time, with a caustic smirk that was already fading. “Really?” Hannibal had put his gloves back on, pulled up the collar of his coat around his scarf, and all this black brought forward the one in his eyes. Will knew they were brown, with hints of a clearer color. But with the nebulous white coming from the veil of clouds above, the dark seemed darker and more even.

“You cannot deny me what I see in you,” Hannibal said, hands clasped in front of him.

For a moment, Will’s eyes kept jumping from one point to another near his face. The crimson of the scarf, the texture of the coat’s wool, the clasped button, the unshaven hair on the jaw and cheeks, almost entirely gray with sparks of blond in it, the thin lips, then the eyes waiting for him, always near. Abigail was coming their way, she came down the hill, Buster trying to take the stick from her hand. She was smiling. “When do you start seeing patients again?” Will asked, finally.

Hannibal’s eyebrows arched, curious. “In two days. I also have an appointment of my own on the 30th.”

“Do you want to stay until then?” Will asked, just as his feet seemed to leave the ground forever. He had never felt so light and so heavy at the same time.

“With you.”

“Here. With me,” he confirmed. He closed his hand in a fist in the pocket of his coat. “I have no gauge for this kind of thing. You’ll have to tell me if it’s too fast,” he said, dropping his head so his chin would touch the collar of his shirt.

“It’s not too fast,” Hannibal said quickly, around a breath. Abigail had come back to the foot of the hill, mud on her boots, her hands dirty, cheeks a bright pink. She passed by them along with the dogs and stopped running when she was close the house. They started walking back as well. “Counter offer,” Hannibal said, his gloved fingers brushing Will’s arm. “Have dinner with me tonight. Then we can see.”

Will nodded, silently, the world shivering around him with the wind. It was growing stronger and stronger, as if it would blow his tiny house away into pieces.

 

* * *

 

Hannibal and Abigail walked in to get their bags. Will waited for them on the porch, Winston and Rockie sitting by his side, the other dogs still playing near the tall tree. Abigail got out first. She looked at the horizon, then at Hannibal’s car, then at Will. “Could I come and see the dogs?”

Will smiled. “Whenever you want.” He frowned. She was still smiling, a little. “I thought you didn’t have pets when you were younger.”

“No, my dad didn’t like all the hair. But I think I like your dogs,” she said. She looked down at her feet then, eyed her bag behind her and then stepped forward and reached for Will’s hand. He clasped her fingers, tiny inside the mittens. Her smile became a bit more nostalgic and she pulled her hand back. Will took her bag to Hannibal’s car, walked back to the house and Abigail waited down the steps, looking at the gravel road.

As he went inside, Will found Hannibal standing in the corridor, his bag to his feet, the ravenstag standing behind him in the living room. _It was bigger than Will had expected, but he had never seen it inside the house. Its antlers vanished into the ceiling, as if they were air. The feathers on its legs and sides flared when Will saw him, and it took its head down, moving it among the furniture, the chairs, the bed, the dogs and nothing changed, because everything was gone._

“Will,” Hannibal asked. He had moved closer, _and the stag was leaving, it had gone through the wall already. It kept walking, its legs looked like trees, and its fur was like bushes and grass and its eyes were white like snow, and suddenly Will’s house was standing in the stag’s mouth, small and quiet, lit, about to be eaten. The stag did not move, and Will wondered if it would be more like home when it would swallow him, and the house and the dogs, and all._ “What do you see?” Hannibal pressed.

Will closed his eyes and took off his glasses, bringing the heels of his hands to his eyes. “Nothing,” he said. “You. Just you,” he added, and he knew he sounded broken, his voice shook and the walls waved and only Hannibal would not move. And suddenly Hannibal was close and his hands were on Will’s arms and his palms were _as warm as the fever inside, he could feel them through his coat, through his shirt, through the skin, wiring right into the bone, and it was not flesh anymore. The hands ran up and cupped his face, the fingers feeling against the skin, like they respected it, but knew that it was only a surface and there was heath beneath that should be quenched. But no, they stopped on both sides of his face and Will fell forward, his cheek against Hannibal’s. But Hannibal’s skin was so cool. The headache exploded inside his head and Hannibal brushed his hair back and Will wished he would stay with him. He closed his lips near his mouth, but he did not know if he wanted to talk or touch him._

And Winston’s nose was the one thing against his neck that brought him back. He was crouching on the ground and the house was silent and empty. He went to look through the door’s window and Hannibal’s car was gone and Abigail too. Winston followed him, he was the most worried one, but the other dogs were sleeping soundly in the living room. It was almost noon and he should be at Quantico.

He took his car keys, made sure the dogs were fine, then he inspected the wall in the living room, the one through which the stag had passed. He was not sure if he wanted it to be a dream, _in which case he would know that he should not expect to find anything, but how would he begin to explain this to Hannibal. Half of what surrounds me seems unreal, is unreal, and I don’t care._ Or if he did not want it to be a dream, then he would need _a neat explanation, there would be symbols, meaning, something, or maybe not and his_ mind was lost.

 

* * *

 

Freddie Lounds was waiting in the Port Haven clinic lobby, her purse by her side, her laptop open on her knees. There was one other patient, Phoebe, who was quietly talking with her mother and the doctor in the opposite corner. Abigail felt like in the hospital again. She missed the dogs and Will’s kitchen and Hannibal explaining how counterpoint worked. Everything here tried to reach out to her so much. She was the void in the middle of all of this.

“Abigail,” Lounds said, smiling wide and bright. “They told me you would be back today.” She noticed Hannibal standing behind her. “Dr Lecter,” she greeted.

“Ms Lounds,” Hannibal replied, putting Abigail’s bag down.

Abigail eyed Phoebe in the corner, the quiet blue walls around her and she knew she did not belong here. She knew she would lie about the book, to take the money, to make sure everyone thought the right thing. “How was it?” Freddie asked her. “To spend some time away from here?”

It was easy to smile, once Abigail knew that she did not mean it. “It was great. It was really nice to meet these people again and feel normal for a bit,” she said.

She picked up her bag and found Hannibal smiling down at her, quiet and reserved. She leaned in and he slipped an arm around her, squeezed her shoulder. He said nothing, but she knew he was proud of her.

 

* * *

 

Jack leaned over his desk, focused on the carpet before him, not on them, authority like a black hole. “We’ve had no missing body reported from morgues in Baltimore,” he stated. “So we know he’s working from the inside.”

“He might have access to the logs, mix the bodies up,” Beverly pointed out. She shifted on the armchair she leaned against, crossed her arms, shaking her head.

“We ID’d the bodies?” Will asked, pushing his glasses back on his nose and the whole room smelled of a far and lost forest and he looked down at his boots and he came back to himself and he had no idea how he had come here.

“We warned the families. Local police is doing the follow-up,” Jack told him.

Will nodded, taking a hand to the back of his neck, surprised at how warm it felt. Would other people not feel it at this point? Would it not radiate off him? Would he not melt the room around him? “Nothing about who they are?”

“No,” Zeller said, opening the file. “First victim was Philip Mesley. Died of colon cancer at Johns Hopkins.”

“So he got his insides pulled out,” Price said.

“Second victim was Mario Kitsas. Suicide. Pills and alcohol.”

“He killed himself and he was tortured for it. After all, he was after the pain,” Will whispered, his eyes steady through his glasses. Jack’s eyes flickered up to him, not exactly worried, and Beverly stared too, but Will smiled an apology and tried not to sway. “Nothing connects them?”

“Different jobs, different hobbies. No common friends, no common family. Mesley lived in Towson, Kitsas in Pikesville,” Zeller listed.

“We should still check out the morgues,” Jack cut him short. “I want a background check on the staff, students, doctors.” Beverly nodded, Zeller and Price got up from their chairs. Jack rose and stepped out from behind his desk, stopping beside Will. “You’re sticking to your books theory?”

Will arched his eyebrows and nodded. “The sheets didn’t get us anything,” Zeller pointed out.

“Maybe they got you somewhere and you didn’t see it,” Will replied, his voice halfway between the coldness he felt inside and the harshness he could not keep there anymore.

“We better try all our options. Unless we should wait around for another body,” Beverly said, quickly.

A frown remained stuck to Jack’s eyebrows. The brown carpet, the beige drawn blinds and the dark chesnut of Jack’s desk gathered around Will in a vivid pile and, with a slight jerk, it was the impurity of life, obvious, _standing there in the room with them, asking him what it would do to hide it, heal it, keep it away_. Jack eyed Will, waiting for him to concentrate again, then he went to Beverly, then to Zeller and Price. “The two of you,” he said, pointing at Zeller and Price, “Backgrounds on the morgue personnel. Beverly and Will, you stay tuned for the info on the book sales from the list we pulled together.”

“We should check out the public librairies,” Will suggested, fingers to his temple, his other hand in the pocket of his pants, fondling the bottle of aspirins there.

Jack sighed. “As long as you both answer your phones when the list drops in, you can go wherever you want.”

 

* * *

 

By the time they got to the front door, they knew it was closed. The parking lot was empty and the lights inside were out. The schedule beside the door said that it would open again on Monday, January 4. Beverly looked at him and said, “What now?”

Will smiled, stepped back and eyed the brick façade. He knew she was only partly talking about the open hours. They had started with Baltimore public libraries, but it could be elsewhere. Will wanted to stop to think properly. He wished he knew where the world wanted to bring him, and why so fast. “Let’s check the one on Sandpiper Circle,” he offered.

In the car, Beverly said, “Either this work is making you this sick and you should stop working, or it’s not and you should stop working and see a doctor.” She was staring at the road and Will’s eyes were caught in her white scarf, puffed and vivid. “But either way, you should stop doing this.”

“Yeah. A lot of people suggested that,” he started. “But there’s no such thing as work, where I’m concerned. This is who I am. I can’t stop being me.”

“You weren’t this sick when you started,” Beverly insisted.

“That is to say,” Will replied, his head against the window, his body so cold he could barely understand how the blood still moved inside it. “That I became myself in a worse way.” Outside, the buildings were standing back from the deserted streets. “I wish my brain could be removed from my head so I could get a good look at it.”

They stopped at a red light and Beverly clicked the flasher on to turn on Sandpiper Circle. “Usually, this is the moment when you worry you’re being creepy,” she said.

Will smiled weakly, because he could not really hold himself together anymore.

The parking lot was not entirely empty. It was the biggest public library in Baltimore. There did not seem to be any lights on inside, but the door did open. The lobby had gray rugs and bright red chairs, with plants in the four corners of the room. Their leaves hung down and were oily and black in the dim light.

Beverly’s phone rang first. She stopped, her black leather coat and grey hat cut out, as she stood in front of the glass doors letting in the clear white light from outside. “We have a list. The two first names are barely ten blocks away,” she said. Will’s phone beeped in his pocket and he let it.

“Go ahead. I’ll check things out and call you if I find something here,” he said. There was something beyond the entrance doors, in the dark, among the rows of silent volumes. If he blinked, he thought he would see a stag, walking along.

Beverly asked him if he was sure. He nodded, tried a smile and _before him was an infinite meadow of blue, green and purple flowers growing on white ground_ and soon enough, he stood beside a long counter, in front of two tall metal bookshelves holding some of the most popular volumes. His fingers glided along George R. R. Martin, all black and silver, when a soft voice told him, “We’re closed.” He turned around and his eyes searched for Beverly Katz. He did not remember her leaving. “I must have left the door open, I’m sorry,” an old lady was telling him, standing a few feet behind, her arms crossed over her polar fleece vest. It was dotted with pink spots, on a grey and blue background.

He shook his head, knowing he did not look like law enforcement at all. He had no uniform, a worn black hat and the coat he wore mostly for fishing. “No, I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I’m Special Agent Will Graham. I’m with the FBI, here on a murder investigation.”

She smiled in disbelief. “A murder?” She extended her hand. “I’m Miranda Spard. I volunteer here.”

Looking around at the magazines on the tables, the silent computers, the empty spaces echoing, Will did not shake her hand. “Even when it’s closed?” he asked.

She walked behind him and got the keys from under the counter. “There’s some inventory that needs doing. It’s easier done when no one’s there,” she explained. “If you’re searching for something in particular, I can help you.”

Will stood back, ordered his thoughts, so they would stand still. “I’m searching for general documentation on some corporal wounds that were inflicted on the bodies.”

“Doesn’t the FBI already have that documentation?” she asked.

Eyes on the computer station that he had spotted at the other end of the counter, Will did not notice Mrs Spard going back to the entrance door and locking it, leaving the keys in. “We’re searching for something the general population could access. And more specifically, people who would have had access to it.” He turned back to her. “Do you keep records of loans?”

She gestured to the computer. “If you tell me what books to look for, I’ll check in the system,” she offered.

Will went to the computer, searched for titles until he found some of them, then noted down the Dewey code numbers and got up.

Mrs Spard was watching him from over the counter. “Did you find what you were looking for?” she proded.

He stopped. “I’d like to see them for myself.”

The rows were spaced out, but the only light there was came from the windows. They were large, but the afternoon was moving forward and it was growing dark. Will squinted at the books, carefully placed, untouched and harmless. The room spun and he clung to a shelf, fingers digging in the its edge. When his eyes focused again, he had found the classification mark he was searching for, but it was off by a number.

He kept searching and soon found that all books he had found were not on the shelves, even if they were supposed to be. He went back in the front. Mrs Spard was gone. He frowned, put the paper in his pocket and returned to the back of the room, behind the first rows, where there were armchairs, reading spots and tables to work. Mrs Spard stood in front of a table, unloading books from a cart onto it. “These books are not on the shelves. Is that normal?” he asked, showing her his list of numbers.

“Some folks come here to research stuff, or they just like to keep their books to themselves. They can stack them on these tables.” She pointed at the tables and chairs around them and those closer to the window. “We don’t take them off for a week. ”

Will hummed softly and began to inspect the tables near them.

The white light from the snow outside buzzed in his ears in a shrilling sound. He found nothing and looked up to see Mrs Spard place the books down on the table before her. He stared at some of the titles and when he understood that they were all there, all of them, she was staring back at him. “Why do you call it a murder investigation?” she asked, placing two more books down on the table. Then she took three volumes from the table and placed them on the cart.

Dropping his hands at his sides, Will felt his mind void and pulse at the same time. “Initially, we thought you killed them.” Her brown shoulder-lenght hair caught some light from outside, and it seemed a lighter tone.

“When did you find out I didn’t?”

“It took a while. We’re still not entirely sure you don’t” Will evoked, as she sat down. There were three piles of books in front of her. “You’ve done embalming,” he gestured to the pile to the far left. “Then, torture,” he added. “What were you moving on to?” He twisted his neck, trying to look at the pile to the far right.

“Traditional piercings, especially in the face and lower limbs,” she said.

“A trial of pain, inflicted upon a body that feels none?”

“What makes you think the trial is wasted, then?” she asked back.

“The pain is for us, isn’t it?” Will frowned and sat down as well.

She cast her eyes down and Will saw other things swirl inside and knew he was not entirely right. But she probably would not say anything about it. She was not like that, not exactly. She had not hidden to be found, but to be forgotten. “The pain is for everyone who thinks they deserve it. Bodies don’t mind,” she said, held explanations on her tongue.

“Well, they do. If not, why would you do it?” Will said. “There are marks and wounds.” Then, _at the edge of a vast field covered in snow, Abigail ran with the dogs_. And around him the walls of the library _started lifting up and disappeared in the sky, out of sight. He watched them go_ and Mrs Spard was still looking at him. “You were marked,” he realized then. “It just doesn’t show.”

“Think what you will,” she answered, smiling down, maybe slightly shy.

“But you don’t want everyone to know, you can’t want that.” _The wall behind him went as well and things were brighter for a moment because they were outside, but then_ it dimmed down and kept flickering. Will winced. His head did not ache at this point, even if it would have felt right.

“It is a secret and I like it that way,” she said, reaching for the latest pile of books.

Exhaling, Will tried to think, but _they were not outside anymore. The walls came back, darker and stone, and there were ciment low walls in front of him_. “Then why tell us? Why mark these people? You have to reveal yourself, you can’t keep it inside forever,” he said.

Her hands twitched slowly as she struggled to grasp the thoughts around her. “It should exist,” she started. “That’s why I did it. It should not be only in my head, I needed to see it with my eyes and feel it with my hands.”

“But it doesn’t mean that other people should see it,” Will finished for her. _It was his classroom, he realized. They were sitting on either side of his desk. She was in his place and he was sitting in front of her_.

She gathered the books to her chest and began to stand up. “I should have done it better,” she sighed. “Or, I figure… Once you want to make it exist, you’re stuck with others.”

“Not if no one ever finds out about you,” he whispered, quietly. _There were no students around them. The projector was on, its bright forward light behind them. There were no pictures on the screen_.

She did not look at him now and stood tall. She was a combination of weakness and determination, as if she stood upright only through strenght of will. It felt even frailer. “You’re going to arrest me,” she stated.

Will arched his eyebrows and his hands spasmed _where they rested on his thighs. He felt like he was slightly away from the light. He could decide whether he stepped in or not._ “Depending on how you think about it, prison is a big lockbox. It’ll allow you to keep to yourself,” he suggested.

She smiled in both contempt and melancholy. “No. It’s so that everyone can look at me.”

“Some part of you wants to be looked at,” Will insisted. _It was cold around him, but he mostly did not feel it. He had lost his hat, his coat was gone as well. His hands were warm, warmer than they should_. He looked at them for a time and _when he brought his eyes back up, Abigail Hobbs stared back at him, her smile strange and surprised, as if she did not expect to be here._

_Around them, the walls trembled once like a beginning heartbeat. “Is that what you think about me?” she asked. “That some part of me wanted it?”_

_He should have said no, but instead, he said, “I don’t know, Abigail.” He stood up too and she seemed vivid and fervent in the projector’s light. Will tried to imagine how he would explain it to his students. The daughter of Garret Jacob Hobbs assisted him for motives yet unknown. She was initially believed to be a victim and is now held to have been an accomplice. Her prints were found on the knife that killed her mother and almost killer her. “Where you there, when he did it?”_

_Her smile nearly cracked into a sob. “Does it matter?”_

_“It would feel different,” he said. “It feels different to have an abstract knowledge than to…” He wondered what was the right word. “Touch them.”_

_“And it’s worse if I did?” she argued. “If I just knew, but did not cut them up, that wouldn’t make me a coward?”_

_He shook his head. “Why didn’t you tell anybody?”_

_She shook too, like the walls, and the seats, and the light. As if there was wind all around them, about to take them up, like leaves ripped from the branches. “You really think I could? You think I slept at night? You think I didn’t wake up thinking of him, every morning?”_

_It was at this moment that Will began to quiver too. The projector’s beam seemed to go right through him. He wondered if it would put his insides on the screen in front, for everyone to see. What would they see? “I know, I know,” he said, hands lifted, extended toward her, skin transluscent. Was he trying to hold her back or trying to hold her away?_

_She did not step away and her face slowly became less hard. “I was relieved, when he turned the knife on me,” she started._

_“You don’t have to tell me that, Abigail.”_

_“It felt like it was coming together, like it made sense. Like this was were we were going, in the end,” she went one._

_“You’re not a victim,” Will insisted. He wanted to be home, he wanted the chairs of his living room. He wanted Abigail happy there. He wanted Hannibal with them._

_Her smile was not exactly her own. “If I’m not a victim, then I’m a killer,” she said._

_“No. It doesn’t have to be that way. There’s a middle ground.” He was still holding his hands up, but there was a gash of light, slowly opening his abdomen up. It started above the ribs and it was going down. There was no pain, it felt like he was being hugged._

_She shook her head. “No, there isn’t. It’s what you are.”_

_“What I am?”_

_“You’re either suffering from this. Or you’re causing suffering.” A single tear ran down her cheek. “Those are your choices.”_

_“I feel like I’m in the perpetually changing middle of these two things,” he said. The cut was not growing anymore. Will did not clutch at it. It as open anyway._

_“Your tactic is to be doing both,” she said. “So you can argue you’re doing neither.”_

_“I can’t cause suffering and not suffer from it.” He wondered how his insides could stay inside. She was right, he figured. He was not suffering. She was not holding the knife that cut into him either. Who was? “Can you?”_

_She shrugged. “Right now, I don’t know if I can. Not specifically.” Will found the drops of her blood, appearing on him, from the cut on her neck. They showed up one by one, miniature dots of lights, fireflies in the night on his shirt and on his face. “What do you want?” she asked.  
_

_And he understood that he would protect her forever. “I want to be inside my home.” Finally, he was home. The door was right there, open in his belly. He just needed to twist around and crawl in. “I’m always on the outside, looking in.”_

_“You’ve always been home,” she said. The classroom stayed, but the kitchen counters appeared, his kitchen, and the brown curtains, his also, and Hannibal was behind Abigail, his hand on her neck, cradling her back downwards, holding the blood in._

_Will rushed to his side to help him. Hannibal reached out to him and Will thought he was trying to push him away, but he placed his hand over the luminous wound in his abdomen. “We’re waiting for you, Will,” he said._

_For a moment, sounds, touches and sights were one and the same and they tasted like blood and fear and sun._ Will blinked and Mrs Spard had not moved. “You’re hallucinating,” she noted.

“It happens,” he said, voice powerless.

“I mean, right now, you’re hallucinating,” she said.

He had his coat again. He was covered in sweat underneath. “No. You’re you,” he said. “And you should go.”

“I should go?”

“Yes. You should go. Now.”

She stepped back, tilting her head. “They’ll catch me.”

Will shook his head. “They might not know I’m here.” He did not look at her. She still clutched her books. “Leave those here. Close up like you would have. Do everything the same way. Except don’t go back home.”

She smiled nervously. “I can’t. I have-…”

“Yes, you can.” He was not thinking about her. “I’d like to go back home too. But you don’t get to do that.”

A single tear ran down her cheek. But Will did not see it, he was already past the rows of books, walking so fast he was flying. He found the keys in the lock, clicked the door open, was outside all of a sudden. Why was it so dark? He could make out the sun through the clouds. It was a very tiny lightbulb, fragile and frosted. He did not think, pulled out his phone and called a cab.

 

* * *

 

Hannibal was getting dressed when the doorbell rang. He adjusted his shirt in his pants as he went down the stairs silently, opening the door when he saw Will standing outside, unsteady, eyes nearly closed. The younger man looked up at him and walked in, measured clumsy steps hiding the panic running underneath.

“I found her,” he said.

“Who?”

“The killer. The bed sheets. I found her,” Will said, breath coming short.

Hannibal took everything in. The extreme palor of the skin, the visible fever, the dilated pupils, the harsh breathing. “And?” he asked.

“I let her go,” Will said, smiling, shaking his head, hands going to his temples and holding, trying to keep himself aligned with himself. “I let her go. I…” Will stopped, found his eyes. “I saw Abigail. And I let her go. I let her go. I let her go.”

Will’s eyes still glowed with the raging dreams living behind them. Hannibal told him to calm down, to sit. Will blinked slowly. What did he see? And he did not sit in the chair, but he fell against the wall, until he sat on the floor. He repeated, still, that he had let her go.

“Did she escape?” Hannibal asked, his hand on Will’s wrist counting the beats.

“No.” Will’s chest heaved less, but his heart was going faster. “I told her to leave.”

“To escape the law?”

Will nodded weakly. “It was Abigail. I couldn’t arrest her. And then…” Will’s back snapped with the first convulsion. “It was me,” he continued, his body deaf and blind to itself, only the soul carrying both mind and matter. “And I couldn’t do anything.”

“Of course, you could.” He held Will’s hands in his own while the tremors ran their second round. “You could turn yourself in, Abigail, me. Everyone, Will.”

Shaking his head, Will struggled to stay at the surface of his himself. Hannibal had hoped to see what it was in the ocean Will was swimming in now. Maybe he would never glimpse it. “You were there, too,” Will said, one of his hands going up to lay flat on Hannibal’s chest.

“Where?”

“With us.” Will’s head jerked a few times, but his eyes would not let go. “You’re different,” he realized in a whisper, fingers clinging at the shirt.

Hannibal gave a polite smile. “Underdressed, maybe. My apologies. I didn’t expect you so early,” he explained.

Will did not agree. “No,” he insisted, through clenched teeth. “You’re different inside.”

“Do you want to see, what lies there?” Hannibal asked, nothing but water under him, leaving him to float with Will.

Will nodded, fighting the deep sleep that was pushing him away.

Hannibal took Will’s right hand while undoing the first buttons of his shirt. He placed the hand flat on his naked chest. The palm was so warm against his skin, fear slipped in his admiration and bewilderment. “You know, Will. It’s the same as inside you,” he murmured. Will lifted his other hand, tried to reach him, curled his fingers against his chest.

Then he seized and Hannibal cradled him until it stopped. When the shocks subsided, he considered his options. The fever was so high, what Will needed at this point was an ice bath. It was impossible given the tachycardia. His chin in Will’s hair, he thought of taking him to the basement, but he could come back to consciousness at whatever moment.

Placing the body on the ground, Hannibal went to the kitchen, took the phone and called an ambulance. A patient had just had a severe seizure at his home. Then he buttoned his shirt up, went back to the hallway and held Will to his chest.

 

* * *

 

Her mother’s cranberry flavored hot punch was the same as ever. It was as strong as Alana remembered it. She felt warmer and watched the lake in front of the house. Her two nieces played in the snow, near the ice. It was not frozen over yet.

She thought of her childhood here, of the long walks and the candles in the windows. She pulled out her cell phone.

Will did not pick up. She thought about leaving a message. By the time she was done hesitating, the voice mail had beeped. She did not want to hang up, so she told the truth. “It’s me. I wasn’t sure about leaving a message, then the beep sounded and I didn’t want to hang up.” She sighed. “I’m home. And it’s making me think of you. And I wanted to share that.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The good news is that there will be an epilogue, since I thought it was better to split this 17,000 words chapter (!) in two. The bad news is that I won't be able to edit it properly before next Sunday. I apologize. I thought the monstrousness of this fic was mostly in its size, but super-cephalitis Will also turned out to be something.


	5. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm still unsure this qualifies as a happy ending... but here it is.
> 
> Thanks to every reading soul! I wish you all the love, the kittens and the windy wintery nights!

 

January 1

 

In the corridor, bright, tall golden letters wished Alana a happy new year. On the fourth floor front desk facing the elevator, three half-emptied glasses of wine had been placed behind a plant. It was only seven in the morning.

She passed two patients wearing thick robes, clutching their IV stands, wandering, silouhetted in white against the wide window at the end of the hallway. Alana had gone home to change and leave her suitcase. She was still tired from the flight and from the news she had received by phone from Hannibal, then from Jack, and her friendship for Will had fallen in a deep pit, it amplified and hung around her in pulsing shreds.

The doctors had started with lumbar punctures and had moved on to testing for viruses. When all were negative, they had stopped the antibiotics and moved to straight anti-inflammatories. At this point, Hannibal had told her, the pain was too much. Will was put in a coma for 24 hours. He had been awoken a few hours ago, but he was still out. She had delayed coming because part of her was glad that he was only physically sick, because she knew that Hannibal would be there. Now she felt guilty for these same reasons.

She thought that it was odd how things had shifted so fast. She should feel more different.

She turned in the right room. The blinds were partially drawn, leaving only a thin ray of morning light in. It went from the window to the door and split the room in two.

On one side, the bed and the monitors glanced down upon Will’s body in the sheets, his skin a strange kind of color, between gray and white, reposed under the blue sheets and thin coverlet. She had not been a patient in a hospital since she had broken her ankle in college, but she recalled that she had always been cold, like the blankets were never thick enough, never warm enough.

On the other side, Hannibal had been sleeping sitting up on the couch, head tilted on his shoulder, long legs stretched out and crossed before him, hands in his lap, his light shirt a spot on the dark cushions. He woke up when she walked in.

Will looked peaceful in the bed, still intubated, silent among the steady hums and beeps of the machines gathered around him. The strain was more obvious in Hannibal, his shirt and vest creased, his features pale, his hair flatened where his head had rested, his face shadowed, the glow from the machines on the other side not reaching him.

Alana placed her coat down and sat beside him, smiling reticently. Hannibal ran a hand over his eyes. “You slept here,” she said.

He nodded, blinking once, sitting up, slowly himself again. “His dogs needed care. Then I saw no other place I should be than as close to him as I could.”

She rolled her scarf’s edge between her thumb and index finger. “I’ll take the dogs home with me, it’ll be easier.” She looked at where Will’s hand lay on top of the coverlet, pale, grasping at nothing, like the barest thing there were. “Does Abigail know about this?”

Hannibal rotated his right shoulder, his face going blank in a wince while he stretched out his arm. “I told her, but it’s preferable she doesn’t visit him. It would only rekindle memories of her own hospitalization.”

Alana agreed. “You should go home. I’ll stay.”

Something tensed in Hannibal. She was surprised that he let her see how much he was affected. Her own surprise was a shock, because she had never noticed how restrained he was. He shook his head, held back and fraught. “I’ll stay with you, then.” Alana buried what she felt deeper inside. Hannibal’s eyes were attached to where Will lay on the bed. He could probably not tell if it was professional frustration or personal attachment that was fueling him at present. She could not exactly tell either.

And suddenly all of it was hauled up: the bed, the walls, the blinds, the strange gray shadows that hung in the corners of the hospital room, even Hannibal vanished. There was a brief sound. Will convulsed on the bed, his hand twitched and he seemed to struggle, waving his head slightly, as if he tried to hold on and twitch up and the respirator plunging in his throat held him back down.

Alana got up, but Hannibal held her arm. For a moment, her eyes stayed with Will on the bed, but she felt Hannibal’s fingers on her skin and she swallowed dry. “It’s reverse psychosis,” Hannibal said. “As the inflammation diminishes, Will’s brain will go through the stages of his illness in reverse order.”

“They didn’t give him antipsychotics?”

“They did. He was restless without them.” Alana sat back down. “He was talking of a secret he had found,” Hannibal went on. “If you’re about to tell me that my guilt is misplaced, it’s not.”

“He has an illness that we didn’t know existed ten years ago,” she said, trying to reassure herself as much as him.

Hannibal was silent for a while. Alana realized he may have spent the last four days here, maybe continuously. “I would have rather thought he was insane,” he mused. “Perhaps I want him to be.”

“He’s not,” she insisted. A nurse went by in the corridor, heels clicking on the floor. Will stirred in his bed. “And you’ll have to deal with that. We all are going to have to deal with that.”

She leaned back in her seat as Will’s lips tried to form words around the respirator. Hannibal stretched his left arm over the couch’s arm, flexing his fingers. “There were no signs of psychosis. He didn’t tell me the extent of his hallucinations.”

Alana could not sit still. She got up to pull the blinds open. “He probably didn’t know the extent of his hallucinations...”

“I thought he was rationalizing.”

“Hannibal, this isn’t your fault,” she said, unwavering, her back to the window. She knew she had to look like she was only a bunch of shadows against the sun, like she plunged them all in night and dark.

At least, she could see Hannibal’s face better. He seemed a bit paler, lips dry and eyes shining among the rest. “Is that your professional opinion?”

She tilted her head back and sighed. “My professional advice is this. Go home. Sleep. Think about something else.”

He lowered his eyes. “What’s your advice as a friend?”

She smiled, acquiescent already. “Stay here. Don’t sleep. Don’t think about something else.” She reached for the tie that held her hair in a bun, pulled it and the strands tumbled on her shoulders. Looking at her own shadow, sketched onto the floor, she said, “As your friend, I can also get you coffee.”

 

* * *

 

While Alana was gone, he got up and went to check on Will’s vitals. His pulse was stable, but the muscular spasms were not better. Crouching beside the bed, Hannibal stared at Will’s inert features and considered how much of the soul was molecules and how many of its components were blood, electricity and synaptic structures. Like a flame, Will’s illness had burned fast and sudden and what it had burned with was transformed and Hannibal was there, awaiting to see if the newborn being could speak.

He heard Alana’s pace in the corridor, stood up and went to the window to look down at the indifferent, winter world. It had snowed considerably in the past few days and things were unendurably brilliant.

Alana returned with two coffees in paper cups. She seemed more solid, as if braced for what she was seeing. “I talked to Abigail yesterday,” she said, handing him his cup. “She sounded stable, confident, balanced. What happened?”

“She seemed less depressed. Perhaps has she managed to agregate a new sense of security, if not of attachment,” he evoked. “You’re right. She would be better on her own.”

“We’re overwhelmed with what’s happening to Will, right now. We shouldn’t make decisions for Abigail because of what’s going on.”

“What’s happening to Will could also not stop happening,” he said, cold, eyes on the parking lot outside and the miniature strangers going about.

She pulled the blinds open wider, so she could stand beside him before the window. “We don’t have to think of it now.” She bit her lip. “I don’t want to think of it now.” On the bed behind them, Will moved. Hannibal heard the same ruffling of sheets he had listened to last night, and the nights and days before. Then something ressembling a voice. It was only the flow of air being obstructed in the respirator. “Is he talking?”

“He tries to, but he’s unconscious,” Hannibal said. “Before he was intubated, he told me I was covered in black feathers.” _The fever dark in Will’s eyes, pale on his forehead, as if he liquified inside and came out of himself, not holding back for anyone, or anything. “You have to see them. You see everything. Don’t you see them as well?” Will said, fingers on Hannibal’s arm, feeling through the shirt, but his eyes were blind and for a long moment, Hannibal thought better to snap his neck, right there, in the silence of the room and the business of the hospital, because he could be gone so much he would not be himself or because he could remember the blinking light in Hannibal’s office._

“It can mean anything.” Alana drank from her coffee. “Was he afraid?”

“No, not at all. He seemed curious, or fascinated.” He paused. “I thought he trusted me. He probably won’t again.”

“Trust you for what?”

“Not thinking he was insane.”

“I’m not sure Will trusts anyone with his mind.” She turned toward him, her eyes colder and remote, almost desperate. “And I understand why he wouldn’t,” she added, with a soft smirk. “You should stop that train of thought.”

He shook his head. In the bright light of outside, the sky did not look like any color of any kind. It was only empty, trivial, spread. “Pain is good. It’s merely a reaction, the answer of my brain to a stimulus, proof of life, triumph of light over mudded waters.” Now that the sun had hitched higher, and with the dimmer lighting inside, Hannibal could see a faint reflection of himself in the window. It appeared far away, as if only a part of him was there. It seemed proper since he felt scattered. He tilted his head, considering the fact with as much curiosity as wonder.

“Don’t let the reaction flood you. It’s tempting. To surrender to what things make of us.”

“Are you never flooded?”

Alana’s eyes left him to return to Will. He had stopped moving, his lack of consciousness reigning again. “Of course. But I know the flood doesn’t stay forever. Eventually, it pulls back, the river settles into its bed and leaves the lands around it dead. Passivity is an illusion. It belongs in a particular landscape.”

He had never before entertained thoughts of killing Alana Bloom. Now, he found that he would kill her painlessly, then drain the blood from her and dispose her empty body seated, arms and legs open, as if to hug the world into her chest. The abdominal cavity would be open and she would be forever beautiful and loving, void of life, for she had given it all away, mother earth.

“You’re right,” he said. “And, in the current circumstances, Jack’s technique might be better.”

“What technique?”

“Dealing with his guilt by being absent, instead of by being present.”

The younger woman brushed her hair over her shoulder, her skin paler into the morning's infinite sky. She had tensed, he could tell she resented Jack Crawford as well. “I’m sure none of these techniques works,” was what she said, after a moment.

Looking at the glass again, Hannibal searched for his reflection but could not find it. The sun was masked and the light had evened out. Now inside and outside were the same, thick shapes and faded colors.

“How long did you stay at Will’s home?” Alana asked him.

“I left when Abigail did.” He turned away from the window, went back to the couch to take his jacket. “What’s on your mind?”

She shrugged, shook her head, quickly dismissing a thought. “Jack told me you didn’t want to treat Will anymore.”

“Not report to him about it.” Hannibal’s face was hidden from Alana. From the corner of his eyes, he could see Will’s body, still outside and restless inside. Perhaps would it never be anything more than a body in the future. He would have to have it. He would start with the eyes, no doubt. He would find a way to preserve them and replace them with gold. And it was in his own skull that he felt the boiling metal being poured and he went back to Will’s leaden form.

Alana had come by his side. She squeezed his arm.

“There’s no way to say how his memory will be affected,” he said.

 

January 3

 

_The stab wound in his shoulder still felt wet, but it must be from the bandage and the sweat underneath. He pulled the cuffs of his shirt down on his wrists as he walked past two more doors, back straight, nodding to Martin and Stowley when they looked up from their desk._

_The door where he was headed was at the end of a narrow corridor. He knocked and was told to come in._

_“Officer Graham,” a middle-aged man said, getting up from one of the two dark couches that faced each other in front of the hazel desk._

_“Dr Malville,” he said._

_They shook hands and the psychiatrist gestured for him to sit down._

_Dr Malville opened his file. Will’s eyes went to it, it was relatively thin, as this was his first psychological evaluation. But from now on, he suspected it would only grow, because there would be no other way it went. “Do you only work here?” he asked, feeling that the silence was there only to be broken._

_The other man looked up at him from the file, noted something down, then closed it. His affable smile struck Will as artificial, but everyone was fake outside. It needed time to go inside. Most people would not even look inside at all. “Why do you feel the need to ask that question?”_

_Will cocked his head and stared downward at his right, hesitating between the urge to hold the other man’s gaze because of the tone and the need to look down in submission because of the words used. “Just making conversation,” he said. “Is my asking questions perceived as aggression?”_

_“No,” Malville lied, smiling. “Have you had psychological evaluations before?”_

_“I had regular psychometric testing during my training. I did fine on all of them.”_

_Malville had opened his file again. “You had an autism diagnosis in the sixth grade.” Will did not answer fast enough. “Are you surprised this is in there?”_

_“Yes,” Will admitted. “It was not a firm diagnosis. Asperger’s was overdiagnosed in the late eighties. It was popular and I fit the type.”_

_“How so?”_

_“I kept to myself, concentrated easily, had less friends than others”_

_“You don’t keep to yourself anymore?”_

_Will straightened in his seat and brought his eyes to Dr Malville. “Isn’t that in the file?”_

_“I’m trying to evaluate your perception of yourself.”_

_“It’s hard to tell how I perceive myself, if I don’t know what objective information you have.”_

_Dr Malville closed the file, which Will took as an indication that he was changing tactics. “What happened Thursday, Will?”_

The gun was pointed and its slick blackness shone in the dark of the room, darker than the rest, and he had almost pressed the trigger, but he had thought he should look to the eyes first, if only to know what he was about to do. _And he still did not know what he had seen that had changed his mind._ The world had seemed reversed and he saw himself, looking at himself and holding the same gun, and everything flooded in, the laughs in the classroom, the mother holding him to her chest, smelling of cigarettes and gin, and the pain, oh the pain, and the relief that he could bring others, because he provided them with solace, and the shaking leaves of the trees in the evening, and getting high, it was like the smell of summers and pools and a neat house all over again. _And Will Graham_ was alone with Harold Nemses among the smells of cooked crack, the fumes and the burns, and the feeling of the rug he reclined onto, staring at the ceiling, blessed and beginning to fly, and he had not heard Nemses’ friend coming from the back _with the kitchen knife that bounced on his shoulder blade, slid down, through the trapezius into the rhomboids._

_“I couldn’t move. I froze.”_

_Malville crossed his legs and leaned back into his seat. “That’s in your report,” he said. “Do you know why?”_

_Will frowned, looked at his hands, then back at Marville. “Yes.” Not the eyes, but the eyelids. “I understood why he was doing what he was doing, and it distracted me.”_

_“Distracted you?” Will nodded. “You don’t think that’s a light word?”_

_“I didn’t act fast enough, I don’t know if there’s another word for it.”_

_“Were you scared?”_

_Will felt like he had reached a tipping point. He knew he should say yes, but he did not know where to go from there. If anything had scared him, it was himself, what he had become and what more he would become if he had pulled that trigger: someone who could reach down to someone’s truth, pull it out, hold it in their hands and then push it away to let it die. And that death, the quiet death of things unseen and scary, that was the strongest fear. “No,” he said._

* * *

 

Will woke up alone. The room was dark and he tried to reach for his shoulder, to see if the blade was still in, because it hurt so much. But his hands were tied down. And in his head, there was such a bright pain, coming in waves, dull and bright, dull and bright, dull and he would have yelled, but there was a tube down his throat. Hands caught him and pinned him back to the bed. There was nothing wrong with his shoulder.

 

* * *

 

Jack came back home around midnight. Bella’s sleep was so light, she felt like she did not wake up at all. She only found herself in bed with the now familiar, deep, vain pain in her chest. It was somewhere above the stomach. She had thought it should be closer to her neck, where it would seem connected to her breath, like what would slowly choke the life out of her. Instead, it was just below the ribs and it was somehow liquid, as if it moved from one side to the other, sliding.

It had started unexpectedly and she had still not talked about it to her doctor, waiting until she was certain it was not psychosomatic. She brought her hand to her belly over the gown and was tempted to press down, to see if it would hurt, when Jack came into the room, closing the door softly behind him.

“He woke up,” he said, undoing his tie. She watched him change into his pajamas, then wait, then start speaking, stop, start again. “I saw it all happen. I saw him going mad and I didn’t stop him,” he finally said.

She knew that he had not expected that, could not expect that. When would it ever happen, that his wife was secretly gravely ill and that Will Graham was also secretly eaten away by something solemn and insidious that made him look like what everyone thought he secretly was. In Bella’s case, it was not Jack's fault, not even indirectly. But she did not mention that. “You’ve lost people before.”

“Will isn’t lost.”

“And that’s the problem,” she said. “There’s nothing you could have done, save for not being you, Jack.”

Jack looked down at where her fingers were lined up on his arm. “He doesn’t seem to remember a lot.”

“Maybe he’ll have forgotten you.”

“I don’t want him to.” Jack leaned back against the pillows, stretching his legs on the coverlet. “But maybe that’s better for him.”

Bella frowned. “Since when do you distinguish between what you want and what’s good?” she said. “We don’t always want the good things.”

“I literally burned his brain out.”

Sideways, where her eyes went, on the table by the bed, there were no books on cancer, no research, nothing. Because when she had looked it up, trying to organize the idea into her mind that she was going to die, holding it to herself that, at least, she would know what the thing was, she had found things in magical, technical writing that she did not understand and a ton of other papers and books, which she understood perfectly, and which told her that she had somehow, to some degree, done this to herself. “Often, we think we know people and we don’t. And, just as often, we think we know people and we do.”

“Yes. I know Will’s mind is sound.” He closed his eyes and, as he did, a single riddle that went out from his eye to his temple was drawn. “Only, it might not be Will’s mind now.”

 

January 4

 

For a moment, once more, Will thought he was back in Charity Hospital, in New Orleans. But he remembered the fan on the ceiling of his room there and there was none here, only straight, white paper tiles. It was just a dream and it clearly was just a dream. He opened his eyes at last and all things were clear. He knew he was no longer intubated, but it had possibly been removed just hours ago. 

It came back in spots, _like shades and lights moving in turn on the ground where the sun projects the shape of tree leaves._ The candles _on the table_. _The patterned sheets._ The pile of _books. The dark_ library. Alana’s hair _faintly glowing. Abigail,_ smiling. The dogs _outside. Hannibal._ The vice around the second body’s head. _Hannibal again. The knife in Nicholas Boyle’s body,_ the knife in every girl’s body and Abigail’s _hands around it. And what was inside Hannibal and_ why did it feel like he had always known it.

But suddenly the world coalesced sharply, and things were themselves again, just like color being applied on a black and white film. It felt fine while it was just grays, but now there was nothing hidden at all. And Will’s mind was about to do its next move and wonder if maybe there was something hidden, but it did not. (It stayed right there, as if numb or terrified.)

Will knew there was something wrong. It would also take a long time before he could run the narrative of his memory through and look for what was missing. (Maybe he would not be aware that anything was missing, if it was really missing, he would normally have thought, and did not.) But right now Beverly Katz was with him, her hand was in his for a second, then he turned his head and she slipped it out. He calmed down, she smiled, and he knew he would lie.

She did not say anything. “I’m here,” he said. His voice was rasp, almost to the point of coughing.

“You want some water?”

He realized he was thirsty. “Yes, yes.” She helped him sit up and he held the glass himself to drink. His fingers and wrist felt stiff, as if he had spent a long time clinging on something. Again, there should be pain but there was not. And his head should definitively ache, but it did not. The only thing he felt behind his eyes was a muffled cloud of pressure that wanted to go outward.

“We caught her, if that’s any relief,” Beverly said. “At least, the tabloids aren’t entirely right and she isn’t a grandmother.”

Will took the time to swallow carefully. “Caught who?”

Beverly’s expression swayed from relief to worry. “The doctors said that could happen.”

Closing his eyes, Will let his head fall back against the pillows. “Amnesia’s not necessarily non reversible. I can remember if you tell me. My brain can have just…” He exhaled, blinked, took his hand up to his eyes to feel for his absent glasses. “Misplaced some stuff.”

He looked up at her again and she wore a tiny smile. “That’s more like it,” she said. “Later, I went back to the library where I’d left you.”

“I don’t remember a library,” he lied.

“You were gone anyway. But she was there,” she continued. “I recalled her name from our first list of suspects from the sheets’ orders. Price and Zeller had been at her home.” Her phone buzzed. She took it out, opened it and closed it again. “Do you remember anything specific?”

“A lot of images that don’t mean a lot. But they should.” He lowered his head. “I mean, I know they make sense, but I’m missing a why or a something to put them together.” He cleared his throat. “I know you’re not my first visitor. They asked me questions when I woke up, to see if I was oriented.” What date are we. Somewhere after December. Do you know where you are. A hospital room. Do you know why. My head doesn’t hurt anymore.

She was concerned again. “Are you? Oriented?”

“As much as before, I guess.” Will wondered why he was still so tired. “What happened? How did I get here?”

“You were investigating with me. You found the suspect, but you left the scene. We don’t know why,” she explained. “You went to Dr Lecter’s home, in Baltimore. He called the ambulance.”

Will spread out his hand on the bed coverlet beside him and stroked it. It was not as cold as Hannibal’s skin had been. It was clearer now than it had been when he had done it. Could it be under the skin? Could it be that simple? He could not stop the images of wounds and cuts that came up before his eyes, but it did not feel like violence either. (If he let them go, the visions would eventually form a scene of torture, as if there was a way to go so deep in Hannibal’s body he would find his mind, and why would he find it there. And Hannibal would let him do. But his head was stuck in its own corners and hollows, his thoughts were mud and snow and it did not go that far.)

He knew he had closed his eyes when she took a hand to his shoulder and asked him if he was fine.

“I’m okay,” he said, as she had gotten up to call someone. “I’ll…” He was falling asleep aready. “I want to see the file. Can I do that?”

“Sure. I’ll run it by Jack, first.”

“Was Jack here?”

“A few days ago, when you were admitted. You were in really bad shape,” Beverly said. “Dr Lecter and Dr Bloom were here. Dr Bloom has your dogs, too.”

Maybe he had been thinking that this was in fact a dream. Because things shifted sides again and became much more real. Alana and Hannibal had been here, had sat in this chair. The dogs were okay. The dogs were okay. His house faded away in the distance. Behind his eyes, it was a lonely room on an empty flat space, without lines or walls.

 

January 5

 

_On the third meeting after the shoot-out, Dr Malville asked Will to do word associations, as quickly as possible. The sun was high outside and the brown walls of the small office tightened around Will, but he did it. Then, he asked Dr Malville, “What’s this about exactly?”_

_Malville got up and adjusted the blinds on one of the tall windows. “I think you have a mild case of post-traumatic stress.”_

_“I’ve always had nightmares, they’re not new.”_

_“Their subject is new.”_

_“You don’t think I have post-traumatic stress. You think I can’t do my job,” he said, leaning back in his seat. “You’re checking for cognitive dysfunctions.”_

_The other man was the same height as Will, but thinner. He wore pants with tiny stripes on them and a dark sweater. There was a dissonance in him, between the strong friendliness he gave off and the tactless questions. His intent was clear now. “I’ll recommend you for a continued psychological evaluation. Until it’s done, I’ll advise Lieutenant Malltus to keep you off the streets,” Malville said._

_When Will got out of the office, he rushed into the corridors. They were all empty and there was no exit. He kept turning corners and there were more corners and he should have been going in a circle, but the walls were always closer. He expected them to swallow him any moment now._

* * *

The first thing Will heard when he woke up the next time was a Kenny Rogers song in the distance, probably in the next room. You’ve got nowhere to hole, it sang. Then, there were the sun rays at the foot of his bed, hot and close. And the absence of headache, and the not wondering when he had last gone to sleep, and the intimate knowledge that all around him was real and not dreamt. You’ve got nowhere to run.

It was strange to be certain of the truth of things around him and not be able to tell why, exactly, and to not even want to wonder. He turned his head on the pillow, trying to eye the sun and touch the realness of the warmth.

“You’re awake, Will.”

Will pushed himself up against the pillows. Hannibal watched him from the table where he sat, a small pile of papers spread before him. He was partially hidden in the contrast from the sunlight. “I know. It isn't the first time you're telling me this, right?”

“I've done it a few times in the past days,” Hannibal said. He came to the side of the bed and eyed the monitors. His pale yellow shirt seemed a lot paler until Will's eyes got used to the light. “Can you tell today’s date?”

“We’re in January. I don’t know the day, but it must be around noon.”

Hannibal’s eyes did not meet his, nor seek them. His fingers found his wrist and Will let his hand go, as two long fingers counted his pulse. “Correct. It’s the 5th. Your full name?”

“William Patrick Graham Junior.”

“And mine?”

Will looked up and waited until the brown eyes found his. (In the moonlight, when he had seen them, when he had known that Hannibal knew the entire truth about Abigail, _they had seemed a mix between bright gray and blue. But that image_ dissolved quickly too.) “Hannibal. Hannibal Lecter. You’re not my psychiatrist. And if you have a middle name, I don’t know it and I’m pretty sure I never did.”

“I have three: Iosef Lucas Bertram,” Hannibal said with a slight smile, after a silence during which he counted the heartbeats. “And you didn’t know them.”

Pulling himself up, Will stared around. It was not the first time he had seen the room. But it was the first time it was this definite. The window was somehow cloudy, as if two distinct shapes were superimposed on each other. Will shifted and made out the blinds, open wide, and, much nearer, the tall glass tea cup on the bedside table, steaming, with golden pieces sitting at the bottom. The color reminded him of Abigail playing with the dogs, but the images did not really come this time either. They remained cold, past, abstract. “Ginger, lemon zest and orange flower water,” Hannibal indicated. Will took the cup.

“Was that my hospital file you were reading?” Hannibal nodded. “It’s thick,” Will commented. Nothing really hurt either but his back and legs were just as stiff as earlier, and everything was real but nothing was really present, just like when Beverly had been here. Was it yesterday?

“It took them a while to diagnose you. There’s still residual swelling in your brain,” Hannibal explained, bringing his chair beside the bed. Will noticed the jacket draped over the other chair, the rolled-up sleeves, the general strain in the other man’s body.

The thickness of the glass kept some of the heat away, but it warmed his fingers still and he held the mug close. It could not be meningitis. There would be no one in the room with him. “Viral encephalitis?” The words felt so strange, as if he knew them just a split second after his tongue had started moving into his mouth.

“Autoimmune.”

Will paused. “I’m on antipsychotics, aren’t I?”

Hannibal leaned back in his chair, legs crossed and fingers laced, observant. Will felt the distance spreading and tried to know exactly if he wanted to reach out. He should try t hold on, because there was something here and he was losing it, it was leaving. ( _He recalled his touch, their discussions about Abigail, her tears, her fear. His sister. The tree in the field and_ Abigail playing with the dogs in the distance. He remembered inviting him to stay. And then everything.) “Is their effect noticeable?” Hannibal asked.

Will huffed. “My mind feels like a bright, sunny hotel room. Like it’s been set up by a stranger to feel welcoming and hospitable.”

“Yet you don’t feel welcomed.”

“My mind never felt comfortable, but, now that I can compare, it was cozier before.” He sipped from the tea. At the bottom of the cup, the bright yellow pieces of ginger knocked together.

“Homes are also hearth to our horrors and fears, where they take us down because we are not really scared of ourselves.”

“Fear is so familiar, I hardly think I’d recognize it.” Will paused to think. “I think I’ve asked this question a lot before. But you’re really here, aren’t you?”

Hannibal smiled and Will knew it was almost entirely lost now, because there was something like a ghost that left Hannibal’s face, something like melancholy, but as soon as it had formed it was gone. “You’re not expected to recall the last few days. Maybe much more than that,” the psychiatrist said. “Do you remember what you told Agent Katz, yesterday?”

“Yes.”

The other man leaned forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, expression solemn and intensely kempt. “Do you remember the last days of December, with Abigail?”

The images in his memory were a lot less clear than before, but maybe this is what it felt like to have a normal memory, maybe he was like this before, when things did not possess him, when he did not feel swept off his feet. ( _It was clumsy and treacherous_.) But he knew everything. He placed the cup back on the bedside table. “She was supposed to spend the Holidays with members of her mother’s family. But she left. I picked her up, brought her home. You came too. We had dinner, with Alana. We talked about the case. She felt home with me. With you. The dogs liked her,” he listed, eyes cast down to the thick wool of the blanket on his thighs.

“You told Agent Katz you didn’t remember the case. Do you do so now?”

Will licked his lips. “I did tell Beverly I didn’t remember it.”

Hannibal looked right at him this time, stiffening slightly. “I see.”

From where he was still partially lying down, Will had to extend his arm until his fingers curled around Hannibal’s wrist, slipping under the cuff of his shirt. “If I hadn’t remembered that, would you have said anything at all?” Will asked, not bringing his eyes up, keeping them down. His skin looked much paler than Hannibal’s.

“I was still considering it,” Hannibal whispered.

“You wouln’t have,” Will realized. He began to pull his hand away, letting the images go as well, and he was alone again.

Catching Will's hand with his own, Hannibal placed it back on his wrist where it was, holding it with his own, long fingers stretching on the inside of Will's wrist. “It could be confusing.”

On Will’s face, a frown mixed with a smile. “There isn’t a lot around me that isn’t confusing, most of the time. Pretty often, the only thing that actually isn’t is you,” he said. Then, for a moment, Hannibal’s expression changed to something simultaneously vacant and true. “Like that,” Will said, holding eye contact. “That,” he repeated.

Hannibal let go and placed his hand flat on the matress, with Will’s fingers near. “Is your memory entirely intact?”

Shaking his head, Will shut his eyes. “No. I remember losing time during the last time we had breakfast with Abigail. There are other blank spots. They seem real, but if asked, I couldn’t pick the reason why they wouldn’t be a dream.” He paused. “I also don’t remember if I did kiss you, before you left with Abigail.”

“You didn’t.”

“I meant to,” Will said. His fingers were curled, small and pale, close to Hannibal’s hand. “I have the feeling I spent the last months walking around, perpetually trying to wake up.”

“And now?”

“It’s like I’ve been awake for too long.”

“And as you walk the world awake for the first time, you let a criminal escape and you lie about it,” Hannibal pointed out.

“It’s not as much a lie as a profound… disagreement,” Will said, legs shifting under the sheets.

The other man tilted his head on the side, curious, watchful. “Months ago, you would have told me it wasn’t in your place to agree or disagree. What changed?”

“I don’t feel as much changed as moved.”

“Are you sure the motion you feel carrying you is not taking you to depths you’d rather ignore?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s what it’s doing.” Some of the fatigue was starting to return and something like a headache was coming back. It was comforting, somehow. “Is your opinion of me still changing?”

Hannibal lifted his hand from the bed and brought it up, undoing the cufflinks on his sleeve. “In some ways, yes. In others, it has been the same since I met you.”

“Good ways?” Will asked, searching for a quiet place between nervosity and puzzlement and lethargy.

“All possible ways,” Hannibal said, voice soft. He placed his hand back on the bed and Will’s fingers curved around his wrist again, under the sleeve’s cuff.

“Am I the only one who suspects things will be strange for a time?” Will asked, gaze attached to where his hand disappeared beneath Hannibal's sleeve.

“Strangeness is only relative to the scope of land our souls have wandered.”

“The strangest thing there is is that none of this feels out of place. It should.” In the corridor, a nurse’s quick pace was followed by voices rising, then passing by. Will closed his eyes and leaned back, not seeing Hannibal’s eyes, intent and heavy on him. “'There’s a house around me and I know everything inside it, and yet whenever I look outside, the windows show me nothing.”

“What would you like this home to be?”

Will did not dare open his eyes. “You. I want it to be you,” he said. When he did open them, he pulled his hand back. “I still feel unhealthy.”

“Your relation to your own fear used to unsettle you.”

“It doesn’t unsettle you.” He turned his cheek into the pillow, toward the window again. “I wonder how you do that.”

“Fear is only the other side of worship. One is your breath leaving you when entering an opening abyss. The other is your soul ripped from you when it ascends and leaves you behind,” Hannibal exposed, drawing a faint ironic smile from Will.

“So I should turn the world upside down?”

“Either that or, if you should fall, then learn to fly,” Hannibal answered. The placid warmth of his smile was the clearest thing Will had seen in he could not tell how long at the moment.

“Either way, I lose something. My mind or my soul.”

“The acsension always holds the promise that you part with your soul now, only to find it back once the passing world has turned into eternity.”

Will chuckled, his head shook with it and it made him dizzy. “You don’t believe any of that.”

It was hard to say whether the fascination on Hannibal’s face was directed at the meaning of the words or at Will. ”But it is beautiful,” he said, silken.

“Beauty isn’t enough.”

“No, it’s always too much,” Hannibal corrected, formal and kind.

For a time, Will tried to take his mind off the things he knew waited for him, both known and unknown. “Was Abigail here?” he asked.

“No.”

“How is she?”

“Alana told me her nightmares have been less frequent in the past few days,” Hannibal said, binding his cuff closed again. “How much do you want her to know?”

“Which part?”

The man rose, slim and tall, while Will felt like he could not move a muscle. “All parts,” Hannibal said, after a short pause.

“None of it.” Will was stricken all of a sudden at the thought of returning home, seeing Abigail again, and he wondered if his eyes would find her changed, if his mind would think in other ways now. What she would think. He pondered what did he think, himself. “How soon can I get off the antipsychotics?”

“If you stop taking them, even with the steroids, the hallucinations could start anew, until the swelling is gone,” Hannibal warned him.

“It feels just so cold, like someone’s setting the pace for me, drawing the lines,” Will said.

Hannibal tilted his head, observant, as if markedly curious. “You may stop them, under supervision, once you’re out of the hospital.”

And it came back to Will crashing and messy. (The tide of the hallucinations carrying him from a shard of his mind to another. _Miranda Spard surprised that he would want her to run. The books she held close to her chest. The secret she did not give away_.) All those things that Will had said. “I wish they hadn’t caught her,” he whispered.

“I’ll be interviewing Mrs Spard tomorrow, at Jack’s request. I believe it’s best I don’t pass that wish along?”

 

Later

 

Alana let the dogs outside as soon as Will stepped out of his car. They swarmed around him, kneeling in the gravel before her door. He was still smiling brightly, unguarded and free, when she walked outside to meet him, but slowly the walls returned, as she came closer. She thought it was maybe too much to hug him now and only placed a light pressure on his arm with her hand.

They talked about the dogs. They talked somewhat about the case, which Will still did not remember, he told her. He also told himself it was better for those around him if he lied.

Then, they had coffee in her kitchen. She asked how he was doing on the antipsychotics. He said he had stopped them a few days ago, after his last brain scan. It was only half a lie. He had stopped them much earlier.

It was an open kitchen, with wide windows, dark furniture and orange and yellow tulips in a glass vase on the table. After a moment of silence, Will looked up to find Alana observing him. He had not changed much. Only a few details, but they did not show. Some days, he was not sure he had changed at all. “We have these assumptions about people. And they’re such a thin veil, we don’t even know we have them until they’re lifted away,” she said, sounding intrigued, maybe a little surprised.

It took Will a moment to process, but it was shorter than the time he took to think about what to say. “I know what you’re getting at with that. We're going to have this conversation,” he said, trying not to smile nervously and failing. “What gave it away?”

She curled her fingers around her cup, settled back in her seat, her pale features strangely warm, a little curious still, but mostly not. “I’ve known both Hannibal and you for a long time. There were a few things he said when you were still in the hospital,” she explained. “And what I wasn’t sure about, your reaction made clear, just now.”

Most of the dogs could not decide whether they wanted to be close to Will or outside to run, so they turned, their nails on the floor a continuous noise around them, like shirping. “Do you resent-…” Will started.

“No,” Alana halted him, soft and firm. “Stop it.”

“You can be as honest as need be, you know that.”

She exhaled, pushing her hair back over her shoulder. “I’m relieved,” she said. “It comforts me in my role as a friend. To both of you. I’m also glad you’re not alone.”

“Do you disapprove?”

Buster put both his paws on the side of her skirt and she brushed away the bits of mud and dried grass that stuck on it. “I’m not sure yet.” She sighed. “I don’t think so.”

 

* * *

 

Freddie Lounds woke up where she had fallen. There were a lot of people in the room now. She had not been moved. Beside her, Frederick Chilton had been put on a respirator, his insides still outside himself, blood on the ground, spilling over the blue sheets and gowns. People rushed over her and beside him. She blinked and someone flickered a light right into her eyes.

“It was…” she tried. There was not as much air in her lungs as she had thought. “Abel Gideon,” she tried again.

“It’s okay, you’re fine,” someone said, on her left.

“Where is he? Did you see where he went?” a lady with a ponytail said, from the right.

The needle in her neck, from behind. The arms tight around her, and the ground coming closer. “There was someone else. He was behind me.”

“Calm down. Don’t talk.”

 

* * *

 

“You’re aware I’m here only because Dr Chilton attempted this on me and failed appallingly?”

“I am, Abel.” Hannibal set the intraveinous drip in place with care. “But your reasoning is doubly flawed.” He stood up, flicked the drip open and tightened the blanket he had placed over Gideon’s lower body. “On the one hand, Dr Chilton didn’t entirely fail. You have now no idea who you are. On the other hand, I am much better at this than Frederick.”

“I was hoping to learn who I was,” Abel insisted. “Or maybe who you are.”

Hannibal turned off the surgical light above Gideon and clicked the smaller, softer lamp on the table nearby. “You’ll become the Chesapeake Ripper. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted? Or, at least, wanted for as long as Frederick allowed you to remember?”

“Yes,” Abel conceded. “But once I’ll get that, I won’t desire it any longer.”

Arching his eyebrows, Hannibal tilted his head in appreciation. “Well...” He took off his latex gloves. “The fullfillment of desire usually comes with the disappearance of desire itself. A most paradoxical situation.”

“The only exception being love,” Abel evoked, his voice trailing off into dreamy as he felt things begin to slur, but it was only around the edges. He turned his head experimentally and the bronze glow from the light became blackness. “Is the Chesapeake Ripper in love?”

“Soon, Abel, you’ll be the one telling me that.” Hannibal returned in view, a glass of wine in hand. “Things have happened that call for a change of lifestyle.”

“When was the last time you changed?”

Hannibal twitched his mouth around a sip of wine. “All change is gradual. Some is already in motion, some is about to be”

“I think you’ve never changed at all,” Abel said, incredulous. “And now you’ll close up shop.”

“The Chesapeake Ripper won’t close up shop, Abel,” the other man reminded him, insisting on the name, while considering the reflections of shimmering gleams in his glass.

Abel lifted his head again, trying to twist around and read the name on the medecine bag. The muscles in his neck were growing weak. “Killing is its own brand of simplicity,” he managed to word out. “What will you do instead?”

“I’m not considering retirement at all. On the contrary.”

 

* * *

 

“You never told me about your parents,” Abigail said when they reached the tallest group of trees.

The Port Haven clinic was surrounded with woods, dense, full of tall oaks and large elms, all of them bare now. They had decided to walk, despite the cold. Abigail’s words puffed in mist around her mouth. Will watched the white cloud dissolve rapidly in the branches. “There’s not a lot to say. I don’t talk to them.”

“Why?”

“I never knew my mother. And I was never close with my dad.”

Abigail was wearing the fur hat Alana had gotten her. It framed her head like a halo. “You didn’t get along?”

It was so cold he could not feel the front of his thighs. He felt crisp and new. “My mother became pregnant after a one night stand with my dad. He never saw her again. When I was born, she put me in a baby carrier and left me on his doorstep with a note. He was nineteen. She was younger than you,” he explained. “It wasn’t good for anyone.”

He had expected to feel like he exposed himself. But Abigail was nearly a stranger, after all, only one he would protect and cherish. She was both so far and so close, so loved and so needed.

 


End file.
